Hi, I might be repeating some things here (and I'm no expert), but I don't know if you fixed this yet, so ....
On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 8:57 PM, John Sowden <jsow...@americansentry.net> wrote: > > First of all, I did not make myslf clear. I was not running win98. I was > only running > the dos portion of win98. I wrote over the dos portion of win98 with freedos > using > the sys command. "sys" should not have overwritten anything except a small boot sector. You may be able to recover that (or similar) with TestDisk since you're using FAT32 (backup boot sector). For future reference, things like the MBR can be saved and recovered (to file, preferably on external media) with other smaller tools, e.g. BOOTMGR (which is its own tiny DOS-configurable boot manager). For PuppyLinux, I put GRUB (Legacy) in its own Linux (ext3) partition which is chain-loaded from BOOTMGR in the MBR (on primary, active FAT partition). Windows 7 could probably handle it (see third-party EasyBCD), but this seemed "easier" (famous last words). IIRC, some other boot managers (e.g. Gujin) can boot from their DOS .EXE (without any low-level installation) into your Linux (ext2) partition if you have vmlinuz + initrd.gz available on your FAT file system. I tried that once or twice, it seemed to work. > My concerns are two: > > 1) In a multi-partitioned environment, how am I supposed to correctly > install freedos on a partition without writing over the mbr where > grub/lilo/etc resides. OS-specific installation tools rarely play well with others. Most people don't multi-boot, and most installations are from scratch, covering the entire disk. It's an arcane mess, thus most people don't mess with it. This is why emulators, VMs, DOS boxes, etc. are so popular. In other words, "sys" isn't GRUB nor LILO nor LOADLIN friendly, by design. If you want to use other OSes, you have to use a (semi-)supported boot manager. Luckily, DOS is small, and FD sys.com allows you to put the boot sector in an actual file, which is (IIRC) how most other boot loaders support DOS. (Of course, you could also boot up DOS with a floppy or liveCD or similar.) I'm not sure it's possible to have a single, standalone boot sector that would load all DOSes. They always vary in their names of the "kernel" (MSDOS.SYS+IO.SYS vs. IBMBIOS.COM+IBMDOS.COM vs. KERNEL.SYS, etc. etc.) and raw disk location and even in other details (initial load segment). > 1a) Do I need to install FreeDOS on each fat32 partition? No, you only need one bootable media at startup. All others "data" partitions don't need a kernel nor shell nor boot sector at all. With BIOS + MBR, you're limited to 4 primary partitions anyways (though more for extended), and total size can't exceed 2 TB. > 2) Now I am unable to access my linux partition. This drive has 6 > partitions. Three are fat32 dos partitions, one is Linux swap, one is > Linux and the last is about 2 gb laying fallow. TestDisk (DJGPP port) can also directly recover those files from Linux (ext2) partitions. Like also mentioned, you may also be able to reinstall your boot loader (LILO?) from original SuSE media, if you still have it lying around (5+ years later? doubt it). Obligatory links for further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/sys.htm http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://sourceforge.net/p/gujin/wiki/Home/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LILO_(boot_loader) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin http://www.freedos.org/software/?cat=boot ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ DreamFactory - Open Source REST & JSON Services for HTML5 & Native Apps OAuth, Users, Roles, SQL, NoSQL, BLOB Storage and External API Access Free app hosting. Or install the open source package on any LAMP server. Sign up and see examples for AngularJS, jQuery, Sencha Touch and Native! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=63469471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
