On 2/14/2021 6:30 AM, Jerome Shidel wrote:
Thanks, I hadn’t realized it was updated again.
I updated the repo version to 1.3.3 on the repos.
It won’t show up in the official repo web pages until the maintenance
routine updates them late tonight.
But it will be visible tomorrow at
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/fdisk.html
<https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/fdisk.html>
My repo updates it's pages more frequently. So, it has already been
listed there.
https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/fdisk.html
<https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/fdisk.html>
Well, I just earlier today downloaded from the link on the freedos.org
web site (https://www.freedos.org/download/) the mentioned "latest"
1.3RC3 ISO (legacy) to (re)install on a couple of laptops to test both
the install in general and the FDISK issue in particular.
Unfortunately, I hit two trip wires.
First, the FDISK on that ISO (which is dated May 30th, 2020) is version
1.2.1, with all the recently noticed bugs. I think this should be
replaced with the 1.3.4 version from Tom ASAP, in order to prevent
people for f'ing up their drives right from the start.
Secondly, I was not able to actually run an install or FDIMPLES. Here's
what I did (pretty much the same step/intent as when I installed 1.2 on
it last year, 60GB SSD)
- on first boot of the CD, I was asked if I wanted to partition the
drive. When confirming, it loaded FDISK (1.2.1).
- I then created a 2GB primary DOS partition, then used the remainder of
the drive as an extended DOS partition. In that extended partition, I
created a 4GB logical drive (which became drive letter D:) and the rest
as a 51+GB logical drive (E:). I canceled out of the question if I want
to use the remaining 8MB (we know from our tests time that this will
trash the whole file system).
- when exiting out of FDISK, I got a message noting that I needed to
reboot for the changes of FDISK to take effect, which I duly did
- upon reboot, I was then asked if I wanted to format C:, which I did.
- after the formatting finished, it seemed to want to continue the
install, only to throw a tantrum and showing the message
Unable to locate the installation packages.
A reboot might help.
No, it doesn't. Rebooted repeatedly and always end up with that message.
Well, not too much of a fan of the setup program as is (let's leave the
reasons for that aside at this point), I thought I can do the rest the
manual way, and instead dropped out of the install into DOS.
That got me to an A: drive (pseudo floppy drive from the CD boot), which
contained a FREEDOS directory, which itself contained a BIN directory
(with the basic DOS tools) and a SETUP folder, which contains a few
dozen small files and 8 or so folders with language names, all for a
total of 200+ KB, which didn't seem quite right to me,as I actually
burned a 600MB ISO file to a CD-R.
Further inspection revealed the following drives:
A: the boot "floppy" (actually the CD)
B: a pseudo-floppy drive, which can be switched to, and after confirming
that a diskette is inserted, shows a mirror of the A: drive (expected
DOS behavior)
C: a formatted, but still empty 2GB drive
D: and E:, which can be switched to, but of course don't show anything,
as they have not been formatted yet (as expected)
F: which seems to be a 100KB, empty RAM disk, with the exception of an
empty TEMP folder
G: through Z: result in an "invalid drive" error message (kind of expected)
Now the big question is: Where is the rest of the install CD, so I could
proceed manually from here (including running FDIMPLES, which exists in
\FREEDOS\BIN but only shows an empty package list).
So how would one have to proceed from here in order to get FreeDOS (to
whatever extent) onto the newly created and formatted C: drive? It seems
to me that there is a serious glitch in the setup process...🙁
Ralf
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