FAT12 sucks. The smallest pendrive I saw was 128MB and that was 18 years
ago which is still 4x the size of FAT12's limit. Here's how you can
force the installer to use an existing FAT16/FAT32 filesystem. This
procedure will cause the installer to detect a valid DOS partition and
skip the partitioning part and proceed to install.
1. Nuke the partition table just to be safe from whatever insanity
gparted and FreeDOS partitioning tools have brought upon you
2. Partition your drive with fdisk/gdisk because it gives you the best
features to accomplish this task:
- creating partitions with offset and size granularity down to the
sector to give yourself plenty of space for GRUB
*- setting partition types (FreeDOS installer will only qualify
partitions of type 0x0C for installation targets)*
- extra points for using gdisk to make a hybrid GPT+MBR partition scheme
which supports FreeDOS - it's possible, tested and it works
You should be done by now and ready to install FreeDOS.
gparted is not a tool that I would ever recommend for *preparing*
FreeDOS target media or *prepare* any storage media whatsoever. Keep in
mind I emphasized the word prepare because saying gparted is useless
would be a major lie. It doesn't offer any of the listed features.
However what gparted is absolutely amazing at is resizing and moving
partitions without messing them up. Never used a better tool to do that!
W dniu 26.05.2021 o 00:32, Felix Miata pisze:
Daniel Sears composed on 2021-05-25 14:53 (UTC-0700):
I've installed FreeDOS 1.3-RC4 with FD13LITE.img on a 4GB USB drive. This
works and I can boot it just fine, but the primary partition uses FAT12 and
is 97% full. I would like to expand this partition with gparted, but that
no longer supports FAT12. Can I ask what the rationale is for using FAT12?
Originally FAT12 was for the smallest sizes on partitioned media, IIRC, only up
to
32MB, but maybe it was 16MB or 20MB. That was a very long time ago, and my
memory
isn't what it used to be. FAT12's type was 0x01, compared to 0x06 for FAT16.
Given
FAT12 and FAT16 partitions of identical size, the FAT16 could be more efficient,
as under 256MB or so in size, FAT16 used 4 sector clusters, while larger FAT16
used 8 or more, depending on size, with FAT12 using only 8, so less cluster
overhang on FAT16 could result in extra freespace using it instead of FAT12.
Thus,
if the FAT12 could be changed to FAT16 without a size change, a wee bit of extra
freespace might materialize. Whether a tool exists that could do this I have no
idea.
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