Hi Tom: You can see www.k1ea.com/hints Dual-boot "Real" DOS on Windows XP by Mark Bailey, KD4D
for detailed instructions on how to configure GAG (a boot loader) to dual boot Windows XP and MS-DOS. To extend this to Linux (all of my machines actually triple boot various DOS flavors, Windows XP, and various Linux flavors), you need to install GRUB or LILO in the /root partition of the Linux installation. DO NOT install GRUB or LILO in the MBR of the disk...that's where GAG lives. Most of the Linux installers I've used lately offer that as an option. Otherwise, that's something like /dev/sda3 instead of /dev/sda (or hd(0,3) instead of hd(0,0)). I'm probably remembering the GRUB syntax wrong... :-) GAG is much easier to deal with. It will boot FreeDOS just fine. The only "glitch" is that the default FreeDOS installer insists on installing the basic boot files to "C:". If your multi-boot machine has something else on what FreeDOS thinks is C:, you have to manually do a "SYS" to the other drive and manually install FreeDOS there. Let me know if you have any questions. I suspect GRUB can be forced to do this, but GAG is much easier to configure. See gag.sourceforge.net. The machine I am typing on now has MS-DOS, FreeDOS, Windows XP, Debian sarge, and simplyMEPIS (If I recall correctly...:-)) Mark Bailey > Is it possible to have a dual boot system (Linux and FreeDOS) using grub or > grub4dos? From what I've seen from searching the web, a lot of people are > having trouble with this kind of setup. Has there been any progress on this > front? I really don't want to use a boot floppy if I don't have to, and I'd > rather not have MSDOS on my computer as explained in the "GRUB for DOS > How-To" that was posted on 2004-12-28. It was mentioned in that post that > the DOS based GRUB will not run with all FreeDOS kernels. I assume that this > means that some FreeDOS kernels will. Any ideas which ones will work? > > Also, emulation from within Linux with DOSemu or BOCHS is not an option for > me for I want to use FreeDOS to run a machine controller program (TurboCNC) > and that program requires realtime access to the computer. > > Thanks, > Tom Murray > > > > > ------------------------------------------------------- > SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide > Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. > Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. > http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
