Hi,
(Sent from my phone. So it will be brief.) On Jul 7, 2025, at 9:46 PM, Lutalli via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
Well let me explain what I have done so far.
If I understood correctly, your idea is essentially to first copy KERNEL and FREECOM from X86BOOT.IMG to the HDD using SYS, then find a way to copy all the other files from the FreeDOS installed on the VirtualBox VM.
So I successfully used SYS to transfer KERNEL and FREECOM to the HDD, then confirmed it's bootable.
Making progress. :-)
Next, to transfer the rest of FreeDOS files, your idea is to create a TAR out of all those files, send it to the mobile device via floppy, then extract it on the mobile device.
I don't really know how to send the TAR via floppy. A single floppy diskette image is typically only 1.44 MB... Maybe I would have to "split" the TAR file into several floppy images (I don't know how)?
What version of TSR did you try?
There are two. A version 1.12 and a version 3.21. They are completely different programs by different authors and unrelated.
There are other tools and archives there as well. Possibly using one of tools like can help.
However, after digging a little deeper, I realized that PocketDOS provides a "PocketDOS Utility Disk Image". It has some config files and programs that help calibrate and communicate between the OS, PocketDOS and the native OS of my mobile device (WindowsCE 3.0). I need to copy those files to the HDD (and modify some details if necessary) when I want to install a new OS with PocketDOS.
The most important thing is, by doing that, I can add more drive letters to the OS and redirect them to any location I want. This means it gives the OS access to the "outside" - the native system. And that means I could transfer the FreeDOS files from my laptop to my device, then simply copy them into the HDD.
I tried sending the files without compression, but turned out that's gonna take almost one day. So I created a TAR within the VirtualBox FreeDOS, then sent the TAR to my device. But then I realized apparently I can't use TAR on PocketDOS - it says "80386 required". I guess TAR doesn't support 186?
I came up with another method though. I think I can compress the files into a ZIP on my laptop, send the ZIP, then use a native archive tool to decompress. And yes, in the end I did successfully extract all the files on my mobile device.
I feel like I'm close to success but now I have trouble copying the files to the HDD... I did some search, found out that the COPY command can only copy single files. In order to copy a whole folder together with subfolders I need to use XCOPY. So I tried XCOPY (either from X86BOOT.IMG or the files that I extracted). It showed some weird behavior - It only copies some of the files I want it to copy, but not all of them. I used the flags "/H /E" for XCOPY.
When I use XCOPY, it is generally with the /H /E /N /R /Y options (easy to remember Henry) to copy everything. However, it does not preserve long file names at present. But, that is not an issue with what you are trying to achieve.
At first I thought there could be some problem with the native archive tool that I used (maybe some kind of inner structure of the folders is corrupted after extracting, or something). So I tried another program to extract the ZIP file then tried XCOPY again. Interestingly, more files are now being copied than last time, but still not all of them... (This probably means it is actually related to the archive tool.) I haven't figured out yet what the issue is.
In theory I could manually copy everything using COPY, but it's gonna be painful since the FREEDOS folder has a lot of subfolders.
I started to doubt if it's a good idea at all to install a modern distribution of FreeDOS with PocketDOS, because there're just so many problems... But I believe there should be a way to get this done.
Often it is the journey, not the destination that makes the adventure worthwhile.
:-)
PocketDOS only recognizes HDD and DSK as far as I tested.
I also tried installing FreeDOS on VirtualBox into an HDD using LiveCD instead of Floppy Edition, then sending the HDD to my device. That didn't work either.
As another attempt I created a blank HDD with PocketDOS, copied this HDD to my laptop and tried to create a virtual machine with VirtualBox using that blank HDD. VirtualBox showed the following error message:
Failed to open the disk image file "...\FD14.HDD". Could not get the storage format of the medium '...\FD14.HDD' (VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED).
Based on your message, I would assume that PocketDOS is using its own format for Hard Disk Images which is down right silly.
So, maybe do some searching on the internet to see if a conversion tool is available that will allow converting between formats.
Otherwise, if since PocketDOS will support standard floppy disk images, you have another method.
Create a PocketDOS VM. Use the modified FreeDOS Boot Floppy to boot straight to the command prompt. Partition and format the VM HDD. Use the SYS command to transfer the FreeDOS Kernel and FreeCOM. Boot the VM from the Virtual HDD, to make sure it boots to a command prompt and keyboard works. Now switch to Virtual Box and Create and Install FreeDOS. Copy tar to the floppy then onto PocketDOS. Now use tar to ‘archive’ all files on the VM to a Floppy. Use tar to ‘unarchive’ each floppy to PocketDOS.
I cannot remember all of the features of the version of tar provided on FreeDOS 1.4. Namely if it supports disk spanning.
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