Hi Alain, Eric, > FreeDOS does not need anything from the Win98 partition to boot. > The requisites are:
> 1) it must boot from a primary partition > 2) the partition needs to be active. Not really... Because you use GRUB, it is enough if you have a valid boot sector in a FILE. Our SYS can make such files, without actually SYSing your partition. So Windows stays as it is, and you give the file to GRUB as the chainloader. You just state the filename instead of the "+1" to make the DOS menu item, which for the rest is a copy of the Windows one. Example GRUB menu.lst snippet - GRUB 2 might differ a bit: # on /dev/sda1 title FreeDOS root (hd0,0) # savedefault chainloader /freedos.bot # on /dev/sda1 title Windows root (hd0,0) # savedefault chainloader +1 To make this work, you generate a freedos.bot file in the root directory of the C: drive of Windows, using our SYS: sys c: c:\freedos.bot bootonly The "bootonly" stops SYS from copying kernel.sys and command.com of FreeDOS to C: - instead, you can copy our kernel.sys to the root directory of C: manually. Do NOT copy command.com to that place! You might mix it with the Windows one otherwise. Instead, put it in a separate directory, for example c:\freedos\ :-) Note that SYS cannot (as far as I remember) make good boot sectors for non-primary partitions. However, if you use e.g. my Linux oriented "sys-freedos.pl", you can add manual correction to boot even non-primary. Because this "micro howto" explains how to make FreeDOS share the primary C: partition with Windows, you do not need to worry about non-primary. SYS works fine with a partition where Windows 98 can boot from. Note that XP is a different story - NTFS partitions are not for DOS. Now you are almost ready to boot FreeDOS via GRUB. You will probably want that Windows and DOS do _not_ share the same config.sys, and luckily FreeDOS makes it easy for you: Simply create a file fdconfig.sys in the root directory of C: and put your DOS configuration there. FreeDOS will only read config.sys if it cannot find a fdconfig.sys file... You can even keep your autoexec bat separate as well. For that, your fdconfig.sys must have a shell line similar to this: SHELL=C:\freedos\command.com C:\freedos /E:1024 /P=C:\freedos\start. bat The "start" bat file in the freedos directory is now used in the same way as you would normally use the autoexec batch file. With those tricks, you keep all the FreeDOS configuration and boot files separately from the Windows ones. You only add three files to the root directory (kernel.sys, fdconfig.sys, freedos.bot) which are not in the way for Windows, and put all other FreeDOS files in your freedos directory. When you install more parts of FreeDOS, you often have a directory structure where the main directory is for example "c:\fdos" and programs are in "c:\fdos\bin"... For a somewhat newer floppy image (actually up to three depending on how much you want) with updated FreeDOS software, check http://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/ (you can also download zips instead of images if you simply want the files and do not use actual floppies) > Notice the makeactive command that changes the active partition > on-the-fly. But you will still need both to be primary partitions, only > a few programs can achieve this, sorry but I don't remember which, > probably PartedMagic <http://partedmagic.com/> is ok. (it can move > partitions too) Sounds complicated ;-) Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ThinkGeek and WIRED's GeekDad team up for the Ultimate GeekDad Father's Day Giveaway. ONE MASSIVE PRIZE to the lucky parental unit. See the prize list and enter to win: http://p.sf.net/sfu/thinkgeek-promo _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
