Hi Jim, from an engineering point of view, I would say LBA avoids problems related to mismatching CHS geometries on different computers, so I still prefer the MANUAL method where users have to run SYS C: /FORCE:CHS before transplanting a disk from a computer with LBA support to one without LBA. I would recommend to avoid CHS on all computers which support LBA. 1. Of course you could create a menu item in the installer to let advanced users force CHS mode, but everybody who is able to transplant a disk or diskimage can easily run SYS by hand. 2. We could also tell the installer to create a FAT16 boot and a FAT32 data partition, because our FAT16 boot sector can automatically switch to CHS or LBA depending on availability, but that would be less elegant and may confuse the users. 3. Or we could give SYS support for multi-sector FAT32 boot sectors, which would be necessary for automatic switching on FAT32. Only FAT16 is simple enough to handle both cases within a single sector. While FAT32 does support multi-sector boot sectors, I would think that those get more easily damaged than single sectors? Regards, Eric
So that says that QEMU supports LBA but the BIOS on the Pocket386 does not. And that is probably why installing to the CF card from QEMU worked fine .. and booting the CF card in QEMU worked fine .. but when I just did plain "SYS C:" from the QEMU environment, FreeDOS didn't boot on the Pocket386 (because it was trying to use LBA, which is not supported on the Pocket386). When I instead used "SYS C: /FORCE:CHS" from the QEMU environment, FreeDOS booted fine on the Pocket386 (because it was using CHS). If you can think of a good engineering workaround for that, please do it. But I'm thinking this is a "user" issue. I had SYS'd the drive from a different "computer" (QEMU) then moved the CF card to a different computer to boot it there. And then we run into BIOS not supporting LBA on the second system.
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