Hi, On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Marlon Ng <guik...@gmail.com> wrote: > > First partition, drive C:, of hard disk is Windows 7. Second partition > (50MB), drive H: , is for FreeDos.
It's been a while since I've installed FD from .iso (mostly under emulators), but I'll try to help. > I downloaded the FreeDos iso file "fdbasecd.iso", Why that old one? A quick double-check online shows "fd11src.iso" as newest: http://www.freedos.org/download/ > mount it on a virtual drive, installed it in the second partition (drive H:). You just ran the installer, I take it? Didn't manually do anything else? > The files are in H:\FDOS, not in the root directory H:\. Is this ok? The only files that should (presumably) be in the root directory are KERNEL.SYS and maybe COMMAND.COM . Don't delete anything, but I don't think you (normally) need more than that in root. So yes, everything else in H:\FDOS (presumably %DOSDIR%) is reasonable. > Downloaded EasyBCD 2.3 Beta build (because 2.2 does not have FreeDOS OS as > an option to include in the boot menu). Yes, Vista on up don't support the old (easier?) XP way via BOOT.INI, so you have to use EasyBCD. Well, or you could just use something ultra simple (like BootMgr, which fits in the MBR), assuming you've already got an "active" FAT partition that has its own local boot sector installed via SYS.COM . > Managed to add FreeDOS in the boot menu, but when I try to boot FreeDOS, I > get what seems like the GRUB boot manager saying something which I forgot. Is GRUB installed on your FAT partition?? Then I doubt it's GRUB. Presumably it's just saying "not an active partition" or "can't find boot sector" or something similar. So you probably need to (re)run SYS.COM (or maybe FDISK /MBR ... I forget, might be dangerous, can't remember whether it partially modifies/preserves the existing partition table, at worst you should probably save your existing MBR to file via BOOTMGR.COM first). > I cannot boot FreeDOS. > > Any ideas? > > Thank you for your time. I'm not sure if it's reasonable to install FreeDOS from within Win7 itself. (You are talking about native physical install, not virtualized, right?) You said you "mounted on virtual drive", but that presumably doesn't give you raw hard drive access. Normally you boot DOS itself (natively, via floppy or CD or USB) and manually run the installer tools, e.g. fdisk, (reboot), format, sys, xcopy, (etc.). So if you already have an "active" FAT partition, you can then run (DOS) sys.com, something like this: "sys a: c: /BOOTONLY" to update the boot sector. An easier way (or maybe good way to troubleshoot / repair) is to use RUFUS, which is a bootable USB made from within Windows itself: http://rufus.akeo.ie/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
