Hi! > Basically, If a version for a specific platform doesn’t exist. The Default > version is used. > > Extensions are > 086-686: for CPU specific. > DBX: for DOSBox > VBX: for VirtualBox > VMW: for VMware > (a couple others not used a present)
Quite complex system! Maybe you could make a table about the differences between those. > Partly to show they are for FreeDOS and FreeDOS is different from > MS/PC/Open/etc-DOS. > > Partly because installers love to break MY config files. Difficult. Some people may prefer similarities instead of differences being made explicit. Thanks for clarifying that backing up the old system includes boot files, config and the DOS directory. I guess you could even add a backup of the old boot sector to your backup zip :-) After all, our SYS has a backup and a restore. > The “Welcome” screen says “Welcome to the advanced installer” Yes, but I was referring to the title text. >> Which brings me to the next question, why >> not put that choice in the interactive >> installer menu? As far as I understood >> the video, people have to abort install >> to get to a prompt, then manually start >> advanced install, that is less intuitive. > > Not up to me. Then I hope somebody else would support my suggestion that the advanced installer mode can be reached from the initial "how do you want to install? full or base, with or without sources?" menu as a fifth option to make it easier to find :-) Having to first abort the installer to find the advanced mode is evil. > At present, I’m not aware of any tool that > does a test for “Is Drive ? Empty”. You mean as in "are there no partitions yet"? That should be feasible to do with the help of FDISK /INFO and a writeable temp directory to let you "grep" for the word "FAT" and for the "%" character. If % is found, then there are some partitions. If "FAT" is found, they even include FAT ones. So you get four cases: - no partitions are existing at all yet - partitions exist, but none are FAT - FAT partition exists, but not formatted - a working FAT partition exists To distinguish the last 2 cases, simply use my tiny WHICHFAT utility :-) Note that FDISK returns a non-zero errorlevel if you try to "FDISK /INFO 1" while no BIOS drive 0x80 exists at all. In that case, it would of course be futile to install to the drive which does not even exist ;-) As mentioned before, I think you should NOT assume that VM users by definition want to overwrite all data, or that hardware users by definition do not. Better check whether there already is something on the disk, no matter whether it is a real or virtual one. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
