At 04:37 PM 2/6/2013, Robert Reeves wrote: >"Install to the hard drive" sounds fine, except that I don't want to >overwrite the Windows install that I need to return to.
Well, correct... >"Create Drive C" sounds like I'm going to wipe out the current drive >C: which is formatted to NTFS That is correct as well. And also, (Free)DOS knows squat about NTFS.... >"Boot from system hard disk" would be fine except that the only >thing on the system hard disk is Windows. Correct, beside that, as mentioned before, FreeDOS won't see the disk as it is NTFS formatted... >"Boot from Diskette" except that I don't have one. The diskette >image file I downloaded won't copy to a diskette and I get an error >message saying the copy needs another 16 kb room on the diskette. The letter is likely as you are trying to "copy" the image on to the diskette instead of using a program like WinImage or (Win)RaWrite to "write" it to the diskette (it's a sector by sector copy, including the ones you don't "see") > >As I dither over these choices, another screen appears announcing >that "FreeDOS can be installed to the following destination drive," >with choices >"None" but what good does that do? I leave that to others to answer... >"Press 1 to start installing from cd to C". Since I didn't create a >drive C at the first screen, I don't know whether the install can >happen and where it is going, and the big one, whether I'm going to >damage the Windows install. As FreeDOS does't know anything about NTFS, it won't do anything. You simply can't install it onto the same drive this way.. >The next choice to run FDISK and modify the partitions worries me >for the same reason. There is lots of unused room on the disk, if it >wants to create a partition for FreeDOS. Well, that would be your only/best choice, if there indeed is "unused room". However, you should use the partition option within Windows 7's disk properties to create an empty partition is there is indeed space. That partition should then show up in FreeDOS's FDisk and you should be able to format and SYS just that one. Confusing might be however that FreeDOS idea of drive C and that of Windows 7 might not be the same... >OK, so I don't know what I'm doing and my ignorance overflows. I >freely admit it. But if someone would take pity and help me through >this, I would certainly be grateful. If there is indeed unused space, I have you a starting point above. If not, you could try to resize the existing partition(s) of Windows 7 down to create some space, but then you might still have the issue that the start of that partition is out of reach for FreeDOS to boot from it. So somehow, with just that laptop, you are indeed a bit in a pickle if you do not have an alternative system all together, unless you are using something like VirtualBox or QEMU to set up a virtual machine and install FreeDOS in that one. But that is likely to open up additional cans of worms... Ralf ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
