Hi Andrew,
> 1) The pentium 2 has LBA support, it sees even a 32gb windows 98 partition > no problem. i486 has no LBA support, so I keep the partition below 2gb. It > is fine seeing the 2gb DOS partition and booting from it. It is possible that you end up getting a LBA-only boot sector when you use the Pentium2 to install on FAT32 and then run the installed system on the i486. For FAT16, the boot sector can automatically detect whether LBA is available. In both cases, you can use special SYS options to force installation/boot in either CHS or LBA style. You can also use SYS CONFIG to patch flags in the kernel binary to force either CHS or LBA mode instead of the default autodetection. While LBA is only necessary when you would have more than 1024 CHS cylinders afterwards (with or without translation) it CAN be used for disks of any size. So if the i486 BIOS announces that LBA is available, but in fact it is buggy, you have a problem. Also, if SYS sees that the Pentium2 has LBA, it can chose to install a LBA only boot sector (if you use FAT32) which will then fail after you put the disk in the 486 if the 486 BIOS supports no LBA etc. > 2) the wording is read error while reading drive This does not seem to be one of the error messages in our various boot sector versions, so I would expect it to be produced by your MBR, possibly because of some problem with the partitioning. Otherwise, I would expect our kernel to show at least some other boot messages before it gets to "error while reading drive", which, however, is not a common error message for our kernel either. It could have been "Error reading partition table drive" ... instead? I do not know enough about your floppy emulator and real floppy to give advice here. Maybe the emulator is not meant to be used at the same time as a real floppy? Or you have to change jumpers or settings on the emulator or the floppy drive? > 5) I am not sure about the LBA support in the kernel As said, the default is that the kernel uses LBA when it can, but you can use SYS CONFIG to patch flags in the kernel binary. > 6) Yes essentially you boot first into a boot CD, and then instead > of booting to the CD OS you tell it to boot to hdd it works fine That is interesting and I remember no similar cases of that, but maybe half-booting the CD inits some data structures which the harddisk boot sector took for granted and which are somehow not properly setup by your BIOS itself. Just guessing there. This can also include CPU registers and stack location for example. > 7) I could try partitioning and formatting in DOS first, then > installing freedos onto that. My suggestion was the inverse: Use the already proven to work partitioning and filesystem (formatted drive letter) of your Windows or MS DOS installation without re-partitioning and without formatting again. The most basic way of installing FreeDOS would be to just SYS C: to create a boot sector and copy the kernel - do not forget to also copy command.com and some other files as necessary, of course, if you want a full manual install. A much easier suggestion would be to use the advanced mode of the installer and simply skip fdisk and format before proceeding to install the packages using the installer. > 8) For the MBR, should I use /SMBR after partitioning in DOS then again > after partitioning in freedos? And then reply with the files? I suggest that you use /SMBR to collect some evidence about what is going wrong, at any moment which seems to represent an interesting state of your system. But please do not send files to the list. Either quote relevant parts of hexdumps or upload the files somewhere or send them manually to those who would like to get a copy. I am happy to receive a few MBRs and boot sectors myself. No full disk images please. And as said, you could use /MBR or /BMBR to let FDISK write a suitable MBR to your disk in case the pre-existing one is really not okay. But again, I suggest to skip the step of "partitioning in freedos" if we assume that this causes the boot problems for you. > 9) I will also try the FDISK /INFO command for both situations Enjoy. You could also use XFDISK, which is more user friendly, but shows fewer details. Note that both also have pretty long config files which let you (mis-) configure lots of settings. Maybe some of those have bad defaults in our current package! Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
