Hi, On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 4:31 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <jer...@shidel.net> wrote: > > I’m working on a utility to check the state of the hard disk drives prior to > the installation of FreeDOS. > This utility “CheckHDD” will scan the system and figure out what the FreeDOS > installer needs to > do to the drives for a successful install. > > I’ve got a couple questions for you all. > > Can FreeDOS be installed on a partition >2gb.
FAT32, yes. I have a 4 GB FAT32 partition on this machine. > Will it work above the 2gb limit? Not sure what this means. The maximum file size is still 2 GB (last I heard) although FAT32 (barely, via additional API) can support 4 GB-1 files (in theory). Some old BIOSes might still have limits making it stick to 137 GB (or such?) unless some external fix (OnTrack??) is used. > Will it boot from the second primary DOS partition on the same drive? > You get the idea. You mean via vanilla SYS boot sector? I've not done a lot with that, but I think you can change the boot drive, yes. If not, I'm 99% sure that most boot managers (including "BOOT" BootMgr or Grub4DOS or whatever) can do similar. > After it figures stuff out, it will exit with an appropriate errorlevel for > the FreeDOS installer to > process. > > At present this is what I am thinking: > > 7 - No Hard Drive Detected. > > Can’t find any physical hard drives. > Either misconfigured controller, no drives, dead drive… etc > Unless they want a boot floppy, cannot proceed. > > 6 - No Primary DOS Partitions Found. > > You need to partition a drive for FreeDOS. > > 5 - Primary Partition Not marked Bootable. > > C is not bootable, run fdisk and make it active or ignore and just > install. > > 4 - "Boot" partition not formatted. > > hey, you want to format C:? Some of that is bound to (barely?) be supported by BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT. > 3 - No Boot code in MBR. > > Um, won’t format /s or sys c: fix this? "format /s" just calls SYS, right? And SYS will update the boot sector (but probably not the partition table). Can't remember what FDISK /MBR does or when it's useful. (To be honest, I'm no expert, obviously, and this stuff gets confusing and arcane very quickly!) > 2 - “Boot” partition not on first hard disk drive and a dos partition is on > there. > > Might be ok, if system is set to boot second hard disk drive first or > boot loader > like grub is being used. > > 1 - Other DOS partitions sectors past 2 gb limit: > > I hear people are doing this and it is working for them. > However, is not recommended. > Warn user and proceed to install prompts. It's FAT16 that is limited to 2 GB. Similar to "classic" MS-DOS 6.22 (and Win95 pre-OSR 1 or whatever). But "most" modern DOSes (and compatibles) support FAT32, including FreeDOS. > 0 - No Issues found: > > Procedure to Install? This stuff is hard to safely and conveniently test, so maybe setting up a VM (VirtualBox?) would be best (stating the obvious here, I don't have lots of throwaway physical machines to play with). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
