Hi!
Is there a way to get FreeDOS entire distribution installed over another OS, let's say Windows XP? Short of fetching manually each package zip file and extracting them over C:\FREEDOS? Or installing it fully on a VM or real hardware and transferring files over?
I think you can somehow tell the installer to not partition or format your drive, but just install to a directory. If you want to use that from within a DOS window in Windows XP, you may want to write some BAT file which loads things and sets up some environment variables and so on, because you would have no config.sys and no autoexec.bat to load drivers while your real OS is XP. DOS drivers will not work in WinXP. People with modern PC might have so much hardware that they have no problems with installing into a VM. I personally prefer DOSEMU2 and yet others like DOSBOX, both of which are tuned towards DOS instead of just simulating generic PC hardware as a VM would do :-) You can also install DOS as a dual boot OS and share C: with some type of FAT-based Windows with some effort and a suitable boot menu. Then you can select at boot whether you want to start Windows or plain DOS. You cannot do that if your Windows is NTFS-based or ExFAT-based or is booting from a GPT- instead of MBR-partitioned disk. However, there are people working on the ability to boot DOS from FAT partitions (FAT16 or FAT32) on GPT-partitioned disks. You can also install to USB sticks or other types of USB disks or maybe memory cards such as SD cards, as long as your BIOS supports "legacy" operating systems by providing USB BIOS drivers for your USB mouse, USB keyboard and USB disks. That way, you do not need to install DOS over something else. It can have the USB stick for itself. Note that BIOS USB drivers can be slow and limited, for example with no support for swapping USB devices after booting. On the other hand, just unzipping all packages into some C: FreeDOS directory gets quite close to "installing the DOS distro as bunch of apps to use from WinXP DOS windows" and is easy to do as well. And you do not have to boot from a DOS install medium for doing it. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
