My thanks to all who responded. With your help I managed to recover the installed Fedora 39 KDE Workstation OS and to install a modified GRUB2 bootloader that gives me the option of booting Fedora or FreeDOS. I made a number of discoveries along the way and for use by anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation I will highlight some of them here.
The essence of the problem was that the FreeDOS Live installer overwrote the MBR of the hard disk, sda1 as Linux names the partition, to point to the FAT32 third partition, sda3, where FreeDOS is installed. Booting from the hard disk went straight to FreeDOS, in other words. Booting from other, removable media, however, I found that most of the rest of the Fedora installation was intact - my /home directory, with all of the work product, for example. Thankfully I was able to copy this off before setting about repair. I used a number of different self-booting ISOs; the KDE Live installer, a GPARTED utility, a MINT boot-recovery disk; but I found that the SuperGRUB2 disk (https://www.supergrubdisk.org/super-grub2-disk/) was especially useful and could actually boot my previous installation by examining the "core image" that remained in /boot/grub2/i386-pc/core.img. Although I was unable to restore the boot track from this utility, I knew the system was recoverable. The final piece of the puzzle was to rebuild the GRUB2 bootloader and put it on the MBR. I found in the Fedora Docs the following article: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/grub2-bootloader/. I determined that I was using a BIOS so the procedure was somewhat simplified, but there is one caveat: GRUB2 can be configured to suit a number of different situations, and different Linux "flavors", e.g. Fedora, Mint, SuSe, Ubuntu etc., may have differing ideas about how that should be accomplished. In the case of my Fedora installation a critically important tool was left out of the GRUB2 configuration. It was necessary for me to edit the file /etc/default/grub to add the following line, GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false, which allowed the GRUB2 configuration-builder to use the os-prober and list the FreeDOS operating system along with Fedora. I ran grub2-install and grub2-mkconfig, and rebooted to find a menu of choices including Fedora and FreeDOS. I took on this task for the purpose of discovery, and I learned a lot about both operating systems in the process. I understand that with flexibility comes complexity, but if I might raise two small objections they would be these: In the installation process make clear what choices are being made and how they may affect your system; get confirmation before you overwrite the MBR. If you can't do that in coding, at least put it in documentation. And speaking of documentation, if you have a custom configuration of a tool such as GRUB2, please document what you have left in and left out: it was only on a third-party web site that I learned of the need for specifying the os-prober. That's my saga. Thanks again for your help. -CH- _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
