2012/11/9 Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de>:
>
> Hi Bernd, Andre,
>
>>> I was going to install FreeDOS 1.1 on a USB drive within qemu 1.1.1 on
>>> Opensuse 12.2 32 bit. After selecting the language in the FreeDOS
>>> installer, my notebook was busy during the next hour with thousands of
>>> thousands of messages like "Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x...".
>
> The kernel produces that message when "getblock" fails. Bernd,
> the message is printed by "clusterMessage" and "getblock" is a
> macro for "getblk" (x, y, FALSE) which apparently is, more or
> less, a wrapper for "dskxfer" to let BUFFERS do their work...
>
> Probably something tried to access the drive as if it already
> was formatted while it was not, maybe failed to set a flag to
> mark the drive as unformatted in some internal processing...
>
Yesterday I tested a little bit more and I noticed that these messages
("Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x...") don't appear if I change only one
small step in my way: If I use the partition label c (FAT32) instead
of 6 (FAT16), all is fine. Maybe this helps you to further track down
the errors?
>> I've seen this as well, usually with a drive C: (primary active FAT32
>> partition) that didn't have a filesystem on it yet (done by FORMAT) Some
>> installation tools check drive C: to see if it's present.
>
> That might fit the above, yes. Is it specific to USB drives?
>
>>> Here is exactly what I did:
>>> - plugged in a USB drive
>>> - erased all partition data with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
>>> count=16"
>>> - created a new FAT16 partition with fdisk (1 GB, partition label 6),
>>> set this to active
>>> - created the filesystem with "mkfs -t vfat -n FreeDOS /dev/sdb1"
>
> You should reboot between the last 2 steps if it were DOS,
> but apparently you used Linux. When you create DOS drives
> in Linux, you might accidentally mismatch CHS, LBA, FAT32
> and FAT16 at some point, although I am not sure if there
> is a risk to do so during the steps described above. Also,
> at least with older mkdosfs (from dosfstools) it happened
> that the partition offset and/or geometry were not nicely
> set in the boot sector, causing extra work for my boot
> sector installing Perl script sys-freedos-linux. I think
> that using SYS in DOS itself had no problems, though, at
> least when you booted via any non-virtual way first :-)
>
>> You could try providing this USB Flash Device to QEMU without first
>> assigning a partition and filesystem. FreeDOS is able to do it by itself
>> using the FDISK program to create a partition, and FORMAT program (after
>> rebooting QEMU once FDISK has finished). FORMAT C: /Q should do the
>> trick. Afterwards run SYS C:
>
> Actually you should NOT use FORMAT /Q in this case: That
> would try to backup some details to support later UNFORMAT
> which does not make much sense on a freshly partitioned
> drive. You can use FORMAT /Q /U to avoid the saving of
> unformat data if speed is an issue, or just use FORMAT
> without /Q option to get a non-quick format process :-)
> If you use /U without /Q, the whole drive contents will
> be wiped which can take a very long time in DOS.
>
>>> After that, I started qemu with "qemu-system-i386 -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom
>>> fd11src.iso -boot d". The FreeDOS installer started, I begun the
>>> installation with "1". It let me choose my language, and after this
>>> the enormous amount of error messages. About an hour later, the
>>> installer finally asked me where to install - I chose C: (the
>>> installer showed me mysteriously only 255 MB). Then it asked me if I
>>> want to format the drive with FAT32 - which I accepted. However, now
>>> it showed me the following error message:
>>>
>>> Invalid Drive! Aborting.
>>> [Error 61]
>>> FORMAT status: 4
>>> Could not format your hard disk
>
> The main.c source code of FORMAT suggests that this will
> happen if your drive is neither remote nor SUBST-ed but
> still you cannot get a truename of X:\ where X is the
> drive letter of the drive in question... Truename here
> is used to check for ASSIGN, JOIN or SUBST, but as it
> fails to check this at all, the drive is probably not
> even registered for DOS yet... Maybe rebooting between
> the FDISK and the FORMAT step would help here - in the
> QEMU case virtually rebooting is of course enough :-)
>
>> Is your USB stick more emulator-friendly if performing the partitioning
>> with Gparted or something?
>
> I would also suggest that. GPARTED makes it very easy
> to partition and format a drive with a few mouse clicks
> and as you have QEMU, you apparently already have Linux.
> If not, there are also a number of nice ISOs to make a
> bootable CD or DVD with GPARTED, or make a boot stick.
>
I will try it with gparted.
>> Standard reference procedure should be something like detailed in:
>> http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox
>
> Good point. We already have that howto for VirtualBox,
> somebody could make a howto for Qemu based on that :-)
>
> Eric
>
Well, all of this problems would be much less annoying if there would
be an image on the FreeDOS site which I can simply dd to an USB drive
- all of these error prone steps would be unnecessary.
>
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