On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > Ugh, this sounds messy. Partitions are a pain!
I've had worse pains. I noprmally prefer to have each OS on its own drive, but that wasn't an option here. The old box this was done on was a gift from a friend who had upgraded, and it's basically a testbed to see what performance I can wring out of ancient hardware *without* spending money on it. > On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:19 AM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I know the topic has been discussed here before, but I'm still >> struggling with this problem. > > Well, Grub 2 is fairly "new", or at least a lot of Linux distros only > fairly recently started using it as default. I know it's supposed to > be better somehow, but it always drags up complaints on bugs or > hard-to-use or whatever. It certainly doesn't sound promising, but > what can you do when distros force it on you? (Your repo may or may > not also have older GRUB 1 as a fallback, lemme see ....) > > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Uninstalling_GRUB_2 I'd as soon not. The only thing not working is booting to FreeDOS, and I'd prefer not to introduce more variables. >> I multi-boot Win2K Pro, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS on an >> old Fujitsu Lifebook. It has a 40GB IDE HD, with a 20GB primary >> partition for 2K, and an extended partition with a 512MB swap areas >> used by Ubuntu and Puppy, a bit over 8GB each for Ubuntu and Puppy, >> and a 2GB slice for FreeDOS, formatted as FAT32. >> >> This used to work. > > On this Lenovo cpu, I'm triple-booting Win7 64-bit Home Premium, Lucid > PuppyLinux 5.2.8, and FreeDOS 1.1 (ish). I would like to do something > similar (but not exactly the same) for my Dell laptop. However, I have > to be very careful as it's such a ball of wax. In particular, Grub 2 > scares me. (Workarounds include VirtualBox, but without VT-X, it's > painful. Live USB for Fedora worked okay but very quickly corrupted > itself, so it's not reliable, IMHO.) > > EDIT: Actually, I (strangely) installed Puppy on native ext3 instead > of a save file ("frugal"?). The save file method is probably easier to > install. Though I once or twice tried booting successfully with Gujin > (mini DOS version atop FreeDOS). I have full installs for both Ubuntu and Puppy. Both are on ext4 file systems (to take advantage of extents,) and each mounts the other's slice. I spent some time playing because I wanted to have *one* copy of major apps shared between both Linuxs, some some things live on one side, and some on the other. I have an open source Windows driver that will let me see and access the Linux slices from 2K. Like I said, this *used* to work. All were booting fine from Grub2 before I did the clean re-install of Win2K and had to redo Grub in consequence. I do vaguely recall having to do some fiddling to get FreeDOS to boot the first time around. Unfortunately, I don't recall just which fiddle did the trick. > Don't forget that you can always use DOSBox ("universe"??) or DOSEMU > ("multiverse"??). I know neither is perfect, but neither is raw DOS > either! They all have their own tradeoffs due to various bugs, > limitations, etc. I use DOSEmu under Ubuntu for other things, but wanted a pure DOS boot. Among other things, the old box doesn't have to horsepower to do emulation for other than simple stuff, and I don't think some of that I have on FreeDOS woruld work well in DOSEmu. >> My next step might be to copy the stuff I want to preserve over to the >> Win2K slice from Win2K, then delete and recreate the FreeDOS partition >> and do a clean install, but it's not clear that will solve the >> problem. >> >> Suggestions? > > I don't know. On this Lenovo PC, I use BTTR's tiny BOOTMGR, whose MBR > "chainloads" (?) to the boot managers for Win7 ("BCD"?) and PuppyLinux > ("GRUB 1") on their own partitions. > > In short, you may have better luck using something like BOOTMGR, GRUB > Legacy (1), or Gujin. I'm sorry I can't help more, but partitions > (primary? extended?) are complicated. > P.S. Don't forget Rufus: Noted, but I'm not quite up to throwing out the baby with the bathwater just yet, which is about what completely redoing my setup with a different boot manager would come down to. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
