Hi, On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 5:32 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello and thanks for the info. Mostly, I’m needing to verify stuff. Except > recently, > I haven’t run any form of DOS years.
Even those of us who frequently run DOS don't do new installs every single day. Once it works, I just forget about it. (There's so many corner cases, esp. with multi-booting, that it's impossible to answer without explicitly testing.) > For the most part, the utility needs to check that drive C: > > 1) is partitioned. > 2) will be bootable after install. > 3) is formatted and ready for install. > >> On Aug 30, 2015, at 5:49 PM, Rugxulo <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 4:31 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <[email protected]> >> 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. > > Basically, I mean. Let’s say HDD0 is partitioned like so: > > 0 - FAT16 w/MS-DOS installed. (not Hidden) > 1 - FAT32 w/FreeDOS installed and set to Active/Boot. > > With or without using a boot loader. Will FreeDOS boot OK and > use partition 1 for C: and 0 for D:? Probably, yes. But you can also multi-boot DOSes with Eric's MetaKern. Things are as complicated as you make them. > Also, do you know if it will boot from an extended partition? Don't know but "probably". >> Some of that is bound to (barely?) be supported by BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT. > > I’m not familiar with BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT. 1a). http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/util/bootfix.htm 1b). http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/disk/bootfix14.zip 2). http://ericauer.cosmodata.virtuaserver.com.br/soft/specials/whichfat.zip > Good. It will same me from having to do more big number math in assembly. :) Just FYI, there was an old except from an AMD x86 manual that showed how to do 64-bit arithmetic in 32-bit assembly. I quoted/inlined it here, if you're curious: http://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=7852 (I'm no expert at OpenWatcom, but I think it implemented some of C99, e.g. long long, even for 16-bit DOS. No idea how buggy or reliable it is, though. Heck, even FreePascal has int64. Add/adc and sub/sbb are easy, it's the other stuff that gets confusing.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
