> > Yes, Maybe. We will have to see if demand dictates an additional > > BOOT diskette.
> Let's face it, people will try the floppy distro on old, but > less than 35 years old PC, create FAT32 partitions because > their disk size asks for that, fail to format them, say only > to themselves that FreeDOS is crap and go back to dosbox :-( > So thinking about it again, the whole idea of trying to make > the complete distro SORT OF 8086 compatible is much worse than > telling 8086 users to boot from some special 8086 floppy, use > that special 8086 FreeCOM and special 8086 UNZIP and see how > far they can get - WITHOUT introducing any horrible pitfalls > such as missing 386 drivers and FAT32 support to the floppy > distro. The oldest computer with 1.44 MB drive I have seen so > far was a 286 or 386 and it is too long ago to remember which. > And it is generally hard for anybody with even slightly less > ancient hardware to even create 360k or 720k boot disks which > would work on the corresponding ancient drives: 1.44 MB drives > make more narrow, delicate magnetic zones, but READ 720k okay. > Good morning, Eric I just had the thought of whether FreeDOS could be installed from a floppy image not written to an actual floppy disk. I have done that with NetBSD, also used such an image (40 MB), to boot a NetBSD installation when the first partition on the hard disk could not boot normally due to some quirk or error in the hard disk. I used grub4dos, am sure if it would work on any CPU < 386, think it likely would not. Now that old NetBSD installation, 5.1_STABLE, now well outdated, will not go through the boot on my present motherboard. It's been years since I last used grub4dos, or PLOP boot manager (plop.at). I believe grub2 and syslinux, not to mention UEFI, have superseded grub4dos. Tom _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
