Hi Charles, Basudeb, > I've had the same problem with FreeDOS not accessing hard drives. From > what I can tell by testing various programs under FreeDOS and MS-DOS is > that the FD fdisk program does it's own thing and fails to recognize a > SCSI drive unless you issue "set FFD_VERSION=6" at the command prompt > (without quotas). This won't help you however. This basically puts > fdisk in a type of 16-bit mode and the limitations of FAT 16 partitions > only. In other words no larger than 2GB FAT 16 partitions. But it gets
You are right, FreeDOS FDISK has very unreliable disk detection. There once was an attempt to use the algorithm from LBACACHE instead, but it seems that this did not become part of the official FDISK. The FreeDOS version 1.0 distro contains several alternatives: SFDISK, XFDISK, ... It generally recommends NOT To use FDISK. Sorry about that. Of course it would be nice to repair FDISK, but then, it has only few "good" feat- ures: Being "scriptable" (can be controlled from a batch script) and looking like MS DOS FDISK. Many people call the latter a BAD feature. > even worse. The FreeDOS kernel doesn't seem to want anything to do with > the SCSI int 13h extensions and completely ignores them. This also Please explain what you mean by this. FreeDOS worked fine for me when I last used it on a SCSI machine. The SCSI int 13 BIOS gave access to the harddisk (including LBA access for large disks). I only had to load drivers for SCSI CDROM, but it is normal that DOS needs drivers for CDROM. One thing which did cause problems: You could not use onboard sound and network at the same time, looks like those have bad DOS compatibility or DMA / UMB troubles. Trying with MS DOS did not help either. By the way, talking about sound: USB mice and keyboards have more overhead than PS2 ones, so for better game fun, you better use PS2 hardware :-p. > includes loading an ASPI driver. So until this gets addressed us SCSI > users are SOL when it comes to FreeDOS. Correct me if I'm wrong. I assume you are wrong. As said, no FreeDOS specific SCSI problems known here. Please explain your SCSI problems in more detail. Also try if it helps not to load EMM386, and try if it helps to upgrade to www.japheth.de JEMM386. Do read the documentation of JEMM386, it is more complex than our classic EMM386 and you might need extra tuning to get a good config. But then it really works better :-). Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
