Jerome and Louis, thanks! >> 1) Does the installer check the hardware and make choices? If so, this >> would be totally wrong since I will be preloading it on a very different PC. > Yes a little. Only to compensate for the different quirks in the common vm > platforms. > So, if you install to real hardware then stick the drive in the old machine, > you will be fine. So, this means that my newer PC will make no difference? The PC I will install on, is a Pentium-D, has >2 GHz and >3GB RAM. This drive is actually an IDE flash drive that is connected directly to the mainboards ATA connector. It all is far more modern than the 486 PC with 50 MHz and 8 MB RAM.
>> 2) Can I install something like the installation environment itself? > Yes. > > If you have a spare drive laying around, you can just copy the intire > filesystem from one of the USB images to the root of that drive. Boot your > old Dos, switch to drive D: and run setup.bat > > This is how the DOSBox install works. Albeit it detects DOSBox and customized > the install process somewhat. Thanks. So my plan is now to make two partitions, one for FreeDOS and one for the unmodified installer that I will simply copy there. The second partition will eventually become a data+programs partition for games and such. Most likely I will eventually also install DR DOS, so I will create a third partition for later use. > 1) Does the installer check the hardware and make choices? If so, this > would be totally wrong since I will be preloading it on a very different PC. Yes a little. Only to compensate for the different quirks in the common vm platforms. So, if you install to real hardware then stick the drive in the old machine, you will be fine. > One other thing you can try with VirtualBox (and Bochs, and QEMU, > probably VMware Player) is use device pass through and install > directly to the drive there using the VM (VirtualBox calls it raw > access)[0][1]. The machine running the VM will likely be faster than > your 486 and so the install should be faster. The only issue could be > that FreeDOS FDISK detects LBA BIOS and put thats in boot sector > partition type but I believe the kernel should be correctly handle > that case and adjust its drive access routines accordingly when you > replace the drive back in your 486. I thought about that as well, but I really think that would be even worse than the other real PC I could use. I used direct access to physical drives and partitions, so I know the procedure. Anyway, thanks very much for your help! userbeitrag. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
