Hi all, the big warning on freedos.org is indeed important to know about. IF you have WinXP (or WinNT or Win2k) on your PC on a NTFS drive AND IF you have a FAT based operating system as well, for example Win98, AND IF you boot from the FreeDOS beta 9 CD-ROM to install FreeDOS, THEN FreeDOS should find that you have a boot menu on the C: drive of Win98 (the NTFS C: drive of WinXP will be invisible for DOS) and should add itself there. BUT THERE IS A BUG, and the installer will not notice that you have *both* WinXP and Win98 in that boot menu. So in the end you will have a boot menu with only Win98 and FreeDOS menu items.
You will have to boot WinXP in text mode (not really DOS mode, I think they call it "recovery console", but do NOT attempt to do the "recovery process" - the process would format your whole disk, stupid MS invention). Then you will have to use FIXBOOT (BOOTFIX?) to make the system boot WinXP again. FIXMBR will not be needed. You might first have to boot a Win98 CD or floppy and do SYS C: to reset the boot menu to "only Win98", but only if FIXBOOT alone does not get it right, before doing FIXBOOT. In the end, you will always find a way to make Win98 and WinXP bootable again. FreeDOS does not severely damage things here, but it is definitely annoying that you cannot boot WinXP anymore right after installing FreeDOS. I hope that Bernd will publish an update for the install system very soon - after all, FreeDOS is indeed able to get a boot menu correct for the cases of: - both MS DOS and FreeDOS sharing C: - both FreeDOS and Win98 sharing C: - FreeDOS adding itself to a boot menu of WinXP / WinNT / Win2k which can already contain more items (e.g. Win98 and MS DOS) In either case, FreeDOS is not able to insert itself to the boot menu of WinXP / ..., if there is no FAT based operating system already present. Reason: In that case, the WinXP / ... boot menu will be on the NTFS drive of WinXP, and FreeDOS will not be able to manipulate it. No real problem, you will just have to add a line to the boot menu definition file manually. The FAQ should explain this - or the readme file included with the beta 9 distro, of course ;-). Eric ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: InterSystems CACHE FREE OODBMS DOWNLOAD - A multidimensional database that combines robust object and relational technologies, making it a perfect match for Java, C++,COM, XML, ODBC and JDBC. www.intersystems.com/match8 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
