Apologies for the zombie thread revival. I recently bought 3 of these Wyse SX0 thin clients and I can confirm that FreeDOS 1.3-RC5 (and worse!) and FDISK are buggy on it. I think the reality is that BIOS and USB boot code is only partially complete and just enough to boot into a more modern OS (ThinOS/Linux, Linux, Windows XPe, Windows CE, etc).
The only FreeDOS image this BIOS is able to boot is a converted to RAW VMDK image from the LiteUSB zip. FullUSB slowly prints 2 dots but then gets seems to get stuck there. However, MS DOS 7 exhibits the same behavior. Floppy Images, Bootable ISO images do not boot on the Wyse SX0 BIOS. It is probably more accurate to say this BIOS seems to have a heavy preference for HD based booting (USB or 44-pin IDE). As for HD hiding, FreeDOS, FD FDISK, MS DOS 7, MS FDISK are confused by what the BIOS presents as the drive info usually found in lower areas of memory and/or what is presented via BIOS calls. When FD boots from the VMDK image via USB drive, FDISK will say that there are no fixed disks present...which is physically true though as users, we would like the USB drive to be treated as a fixed disk. Worse, Gregg was correct in that 44 pin IDE DOM HDD is hidden or atleast obscured from being completely visible to FDISK. FDISK still complains there are no fixed disks and the DOM should definitely be marked a fixed disk by the BIOS. And there may be a drive enumeration error there when booting off USB with a 44-pin IDE DOM HDD together. USB is mounted as C: while the DOM becomes D:. I say there is a bug above because while MS DOS 7 and tools like MSD & HWiNFO get all kinds of facts about the system incorrect, MS DOS 7 FDISK, FORMAT, SYS are still able to complete the tasks of initializing a drive partition table, formatting, and transferring a bootable MBR, and then transferring the minimal set of files required to boot a system. You can't quite boot & install from USB as a casual DOS user would expect. Instead, you need to initialize the drive, transfer setup files to the new drive, reboot w/o USB, then install with a half baked drive. Having MS DOS 7 still be able to install with a half working BIOS while FreeDOS (or atleast FD FDISK) is not able to is the bug. I'll do some testing with MS DOS 6.22 and see if it is an LBA vs. BIOS partition type thing, or maybe a FAT32 vs. FAT16 thing. On Sat, Jan 13, 2018 at 4:08 AM Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote: > > Hi! As said, I can imagine that the BIOS of your > system has problems if the USB stick and DOM both > count as harddisks. But you already have bootable > DOS installed from floppy now, so I suggest ways > which are easier: > > You can connect the DOM instead of the normal disk > to a "bigger" PC with CD-ROM and powerful BIOS and > install there, then put the DOM into the small PC > again. > > You can use the ability of FreeDOS drivers to use > ISO files instead of physical CD/DVD drives and > then run the installer from that virtual CD ROM. > > Read the SHSU* driver documentation or check the > contents of the normal ISO for examples of how to > load and configure the drivers. > > You can use older versions of FreeDOS boot images > because those only use FLOPPY type boot areas and > avoid the conflict of the current virtual HARDDISK > boot image. Then, upgrade to a newer version using > the installed version, or just keep things as-is. > > So there are many ways to have a guilt-free DOS :-) > > Regards, Eric > > PS: Yes, you can use USB drives formatted ZIP style > to boot from with various - but not all - BIOSes. > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most > engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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