Am 22.10.2016 18:08, schrieb Jerome E. Shidel Jr.: Hello Jerome and all the other interested ones,
[snip] > What host OS are you using? openSUSE 11.4 > If you booted the CD under VMware and installed FreeDOS, > are you still booting the El Torito CD? Yes. I forgot to unmount it. Now I have disconnected the CD image from the machine and repeated the experiment but the outcomming is the absolutely the same. > Are you running the latest Version of VirtualBox (5.0.28)? No. I have _never_ run any version of VirtualBox. I have used VMware Player 5.0.2 build-1031769 _only_. > Have you made major changes from the default VirtualBox settings? The settings of the WMware Player are: 1 processor 64 MB ram 2 GB HD No CD mounted No floppy mounted Everything else are default settings that the Player selects. I have tried one time using only 4 MB of ram but it had no influence. > Have you modified the boot configuration of FreeDOS and is something > conflicting? No. The only thing I selected was that only the base packages shall be installed. I have used german as installation language all the time. No editing neither of fdconfig.sys nor of autoexec.bat at all. I am using the virtual machine as it is. When the machine is booted, the first boot option is used. I have never tried any other. > Are you sure the actual floppy image is a valid size, exists and is writable > by the host OS? Yes, I can do: dd bs=512 count=2880 if=/dev/zero of=rawfloppy.img or dd if=test.img of=rawfloppy.img rawfloppy.img is the image created by the virtual machine. If test.img has a file system then rawfloppy.img can be read by FreeDOS. The raw floppy image is created by VMware player by selecting the corresponding "create" command. For the VMware Player this is: "Edit virtual machine settings" --> Hardware-tab: floppy --> Connection: "Use a floppy image" --> "Create..." The create command does not allow to select or change the size of the image. Or at least I do not know how. It creates a raw 1.44 MB image. This image can be formated with MSDOS-6.22, Win98SE, Win2K-SP5 and WinXP-SP3. This means that I am running different virtual machines created with the same VMware Player and this Player creates the raw image. If I use the format program from FreeDOS, this is "format /d a:" then the image gets ruined and cannot be formated by any of the previously stipulated microsoft OSes. If I boot the MSDOS-6.22 virtual machine I am capable to mount and fix the image using my old Norton Utilities. After that the image can be formated by MSDOS again. Of course there is nothing particular about Norton, there are certainly thousends of other disk tools that will fix the floppy. > (maybe download the FD12FLOPPY.zip and try formatting it’s image) I have done this and it formats flawlessly. But this is not a surprise at all because it is not a raw floppy but a formated one. For an already formated floppy, the FreeDOS "format /d a:" command always works. But if I take that one and ruin the first couple of sectors with the command: dd bs=512 count=2880 if=/dev/zero of=FLOPPY.img then "format /d a:" fails miserably. It remains a fact, that a raw floppy created by VMware Player 5.0.2 build-1031769 can be formated by any format program of the microsoft OSes I have tested. This means that both "format a:" and "format /u a:" work without problems. But a raw floppy created in the same way by the same virtual machine can only be formated using the "format /u a:" command but not "format a:" command when the FreeDOS format program is used. If the command: dd bs=512 count=2880 if=/dev/zero of=FLOPPY.img is run neither of both MSDOS format nor FreeDOS format program can format the floppy image. This means that "format a:" does not work under this condition. In this case "format /u a:" must be used to get the floppy image fsuccessfully formated by both OSes. The conclusion is "format /u a:" will always work but "format a:" will not. I do not know if it is really worth to continue investing time in this issue. This may be a peculiarity of my installation. I use only VMware Player 5.0.2 build-1031769 and I have never tried VirtualBox. VMware Player 5.0.2 build-1031769 is also quite old and may be a newer version does not exhibit this kind of problem but due to the lincense politics of VMware for private/home users I have stoped to update so I cannot tell. Regards, Juan M. Guerrero ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
