Hi James, > I just ran the boot disk as-is.
There should be some sort of boot menu which lets you select whether you want to load the EMS / UMB driver emm386. You can use F8 to single step over config / autoexec. You usually do want to load HIMEM, but not emm386. You can also update it to jemm386 from Japheth.de but all emm386 can have the problem that they sometimes need manual configuration to run stable, so they are not one size fits all and should therefore be avoided in "universal default" configuration options imho. On the other hand, UMBs are a good way to have more DOS RAM free and automatic default configuration often works, so "a good distro" will have a non-default boot menu item with a "safe" emm386 config :-) > I will play with the autoexec and see if I can narrow it down. Do not forget fdconfig sys or - if none exists - config sys... FreeDOS uses the former if present and the latter otherwise. > Make the partition larger than 1.44KB so I can easily > fit more stuff on it. Ah then you probably do not want a diskimage distro. You will instead want something like "take a FAT partition, copy kernel sys and command com on it, and run SYS to make it bootable / add a bootsector". That should work with www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~eric/stuff/soft/specials/sys-freedos-linux.zip but if you formatted the partition with mkdosfs (dosfstools) then you may need some extra manual settings for this tool. If you want to make some USB stick bootable, the best choice is to leave it FAT-formatted as it is, not reformat it. You may also have to use fdisk to mark the partition as bootable and / or add bootable MBR code, but this will depend on your BIOS. It is quite normal that a modern BIOS can use the first partition on some USB device (USB stick, ZIP, etc) to simulate a large unpartitioned drive, making the "active / bootable" flag and MBR code less relevant for USB booting. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
