> Am 17.01.2025 um 21:18 schrieb Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>: > > Since the installer could simply use V8Power Tools’ VINFO command to detect > VMware, it would be a simple add specifically for VMware (or probably all > detected VMs).
I did some initial tests on this: VMware indeed resorts to CD boot if I wipe the IPL from the MBR. There is in fact a (yet undocumented!) command for it in FDISK: fdisk 1 /clearipl fills the IPL area with zero. However, I also tested with different legacy systems and different BIOS vendors. At least 486 and Pentium class systems (AMI and Phoenix BIOS) seem not to do IPL heuristics and blindly execute it if they encounter a BIOS signature. At least when the fill value is zero. They might perform different if the fill value is 0xf6, for example. But generally I consider it not to be a clean solution. Btw: installing RC1 under VMware is no problem when using the floppy included in the LiveCD ZIP, as under VMware the floppy has a higher boot priority than the hard disk, at least when selecting MS-DOS as an installation option. Which makes sense, as the common way to install MS-DOS should be installing it from floppy :) I also tested Win98 installation with VMware. After the first reboot the Microsoft IPL is present in the MBR, no partition is marked as active, and a CD boot is performed, or a Network boot if I "eject" the CD. That may have two reasons: a) VMware has special magic that detects the Win98 IPL and resorts to CD boot if no partition is marked active or b) or more probably the Win98 IPL does it by itself. I used Japheths WDE to make a dump of the Win98 MBR and disassembled [1] it with ndisasm. There is a INT 18h call. According to the BIOS boot specification [2] this may called by an IPL to indicate failure to boot. This might be something to investigate further. We do not have this in our IPL... [1]: https://nextcloud.iww.rwth-aachen.de/index.php/s/9NQe5K9fPPnydqP [2]: https://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/lab/specsbbs101.pdf Bernd _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
