On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, Dennis, :-) > > I know this may shock you, but this is a DOS mailing list. You know, > people here actively want to use "DOS" binaries on DOS-compatible > OSes.
It may shock you to realize I'm aware of that. But TJ was talking about installing *Win2K/XP* on FAT32. Those *aren't* DOS, and aren't intended to be. What I wondered was why he would choose to install them on the FAT32 file system in the first place. > I'm just saying, keep that in mind below. > > On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 12:11 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 6:39 AM, TJ Edmister <damag...@hyakushiki.net> wrote: >>> >>> Since I boot Win2K/XP from FAT32, I also have the ability to put FD right >>> on the C: partition and add it to my BOOT.INI as an option. This needs a >>> little juggling of boot sectors to accomplish though. >> >> I have to ask: why FAT32? > > DOS doesn't read NTFS. Tell me why you care? I don't. I've never had a need to read NTFS from DOS. FreeDOS was installed here on an ancient notebook quad booting Win2K Pro on NTFS, Ubuntu Linux and Puppy Linux on ext4, and FreeDOS on FAT32. Win2K could see, read, and write the NTFS and FAT32 slices native, and an open source driver let it see/read/write the ext4 slices. Ubuntu and Puppy mounted each other's file systems when run, and could see/read/write the NTFS and FAT32 slices using ntfs3G. FreeDOS could only see the FAT32 slice it was on, but I didn't care. I *never* had a reason to *need* to see/read/write NTFS or ext4 from it. It was its own self-contained little world. (The machine came to me with WinXP SP2, and was frozen snail slow. That tends to happen when you try to run XP, which wants 512MB RAM *minimum*), on a machine with 256MB, 16MB of which are grabbed off the top by the Transmeta CPU for code morphing. Win2K actually ran on that hardware, which is why it got the nod.) > (Yes, I know there were some partial, buggy third-party tools for > that, but mostly "by design", for "security"??, MS never cared enough > to let other OSes "share" data with Windows. They put all their eggs > in one basket.) There were two I'm aware of, both from Mark Russinovitch at SysInternals. One was freeware and read only. A commercial payware version from Sysinternals sister site Winternals added NTFS write access. The specific use case was a system administrator who needed to boot from a floppy to try to repair a badly damaged NTFS file system on a hard drive. It's been a while since I looked at them, but I recall the DOS NTFS driver being huge. You could boot a DOS floppy and load the driver from it to poke at NTFS, but there wasn't much else you could do once it was loaded. You could *not* load it as a driver to also read NTFS file systems from a normal DOS session. (Russinovich is a very sharp programmer who writes efficient, well crafted code. The driver was huge because it had to be to do the job. NTFS is a highly complex file system.) Sysinternals was bought by Microsoft, and Russinovich and his partner Bryce Cogswell became part of the Core Architecture group at MS. You can still get Russinovich's freeware offerings from MSDN, but the payware stuff is no longer available. If you run Windows, you really want Mark's stuff. > Yes, I suppose you can have both FAT32 and NTFS, and just copy files, > if/when needed. In fact, you have to do that nowadays, Vista on up > won't boot from FAT anymore. (At least Vista can finally resize the > NTFS partition instead of more painful alternatives.) The nice thing about Vista on up is that you can do that from within a running Windows installation My current desktop dual boots Windows and Ubuntu Linux. It came with 4GB RAM, Intel graphics, and a 240GB SATA HD, with Win7 Pro pre-installed. I added 4GB more RAM, an ATI video card, and a 240GB SSD. I cloned Win7 to SDD from the HD, and set it as the boot drive. Once it was booted from SSD, I could resize the NTFS partition and carve out a 30GB raw slice for Ubuntu to live on. The Ubuntu installer was on a bootable USB drive. I booted from it and ran the installer. The installer saw the 30GB raw partition, formatted it ext4, and installed Ubuntu to it. The end result was a system multi-booting under grub2, with a choice of Ubuntu, Win7 on the SSD, or Win7 on the HD. I subsequently upgraded to Win10 on the SSD, and now have multi-boot with Ubuntu, Win10 on SSD, and Win7 on HD. And like the system described above, I can see/read/write the Ubuntu slice from Windows using the same open source driver, and Ubuntu can see/read/write the NTFS slice using ntfs3g. >> I stayed at Win98 SE longer than I wanted to, because I was still >> waiting for driver support for all of my peripherals. When a driver >> for my SCSI scanner finally appeared for Win2K, I jumped > > Sigh, isn't it great that drivers are incompatible between OSes? :-P I don't see how it could be otherwise, given what drivers do. But I *was* annoyed by how long it took a Win2K compatible driver to appear, and the one that *did* appear was a beta from a reseller of the scanner, not the actual scanner manufacturer. But it worked, and I could migrate. >> Win98 reached the point of having to be rebooted four or five times a day. >> Win2K just ran. > > And was buggier (for DOS apps). Stability is always good, but when you > can't even run the apps you want to run, it's fairly useless. Might as > well use a Mac! You may have poked in nooks and crannies I didn't. I wasn't trying to run all that many DOS apps, and those I did use ran fine in an NTVDM under 2K. Win98 SE used DOS as a real mode loader for a protected mode OS, and ran DOS in a real mode session. Win2K dispensed with DOS entirely, and used 386 memory management to create a virtual real mode session. Distinctions between real mode and protected mode went away on a 386 with proper OS support, which was why you *got* a 386 with proper OS support. >> It was up 24/7, and rebooted only if I was fiddling >> with hardware or installing new software or a Windows update that >> required it. I was delighted. > > 2k and XP are dead as doorknobs, totally unsupported. Even most > third-party apps now brag about being incompatible to XP. It's a > shame. No it's not. And support is relative. Win2K was totally unsupported when I installed it on the old notebook mentioned above. But "unsupported" meant "would no longer receive critical updates". I didn't *care*. I installed it, applied SP4 and all subsequent patches issued,. and ran it. The notebook was very seldom online, and when it was it was likely in Linux, so I wasn't concerned about exploits. (And since it would no longer get patches, I turned off the Windows Update service, which saved me a SVCHOST process and 10MB RAM.) There were a few things I had under XP that wouldn't run under 2K, but it ran enough to meet my needs. I still have WinXP Home on an old netbook. It's not getting upgraded - 1.5GB RAM is inadequate for any later Windows versions. But XP still runs, does what I need it to do, and the apps I use still run under it. It no longer sees critical patches, and again I don't care. While it *does* sometimes go online, I have layered defenses, and most recent patches I've looked at fix vulnerabilities that simply aren't present on the combinations of hardware and software I use. The low hanging fruit was harvested long ago in terms of what patches fix. >> I was aware you *could* install 2K on FAT32, but couldn't understand >> why you might want to. > > Just use both, best of both worlds. No, your boot partition doesn't > have to be the same as your data partition. IIRC, most SSD users put > the OS on ultra-fast SSD and put all their > frequently-read/write-accessed (big) media files elsewhere. And in fact, I had a FAT32 partition in the Win2K machine. That was solely for the benefit of FreeDOS, which was installed on it. It wasn't required by DOS apps I ran in NTVDM under 2K. On my SSD system, Windows and apps running on it, and Ubuntu and apps running on it live on the SSD. Data mostly lives on the HD, or on an assortment of USB thumb drives. But I *don't* have a lot of huge media files around, and both the SSD and the original HD are about half used. SSDs are robust enough these days I *could* simply run entirely from SSD, but there's no reason to redo the setup. >> NTFS supported things I sorely missed. One >> was a far more robust file system that was far easier to repair if >> there was a problem. If I had a file system problem, I ran CHKDSK. >> On a FAT file system, this would result in a directory created by it >> to hold orphaned file fragments, and files with names like >> FILE0000.CHK. Once in a while, the file fragments it found were >> usable. Mostly, they just needed to be deleted, and if they were >> pieces of programs, the programs needed to be reinstalled. On an NTFS >> system, CHKDSK simply put everything back where it was supposed to be >> under its original name. The only time that didn't happen was when a >> directory entry happened to be on a bad block and it had to create a >> new one. It was no problem to mark the block bad, then rename the new >> directory to the old name. > > Great, but NTFS doesn't work on DOS, which is an 8086-compatible > real-mode OS. FAT is designed by minimalism, out of necessity. Sure, > if you're willing to up the memory requirements a gig or two, you can > have all the features of other OSes. <blink> Who bleeping *cares*? This is *not* a minimal system. I have the hardware resources to run something more powerful, and I run OSes that can *use* that power. Hardware is *cheap*. I mentioned elsewhere that I have various DOS apps up on an 7" Android tablet under an Android port of DOSBox. The tablet has a quad-core 1.3ghz ARM Cortex 7 CPU, 512MB RAM, 8GB internal flash, Mali graphics driving an 800x480 color screen, and a 32GB microSD card. The tablet cost me all of $30. (The microSD card cost about $10.) I still have my old XT clone on a shelf, with 640KB RAM, a 10 mhz NEC V20 CPU, 1MB expansion ram split between a ramdisk, disk cache, and EMS memory for apps that could use it, a Hercules graphics card, and two Seagate ST-225 MFM hard drives. Total cost for it after I was done fiddling was $1,500-$2,000. My tablet has far more speed and power. For that matter, so does my Palm TX PDA, though it doesn't run DOS programs. Every objection you've stated is quite true and completely irrelevant in actual use. > It's not fair to expect them to do the same things. They target > entirely different systems. Is NTFS better? I hope so, it's all you > get nowadays! DOS is dead (to them), they don't care anymore, not even > about binary compatibility. Buy all new (Win10/Metro) apps! Upgrade > upgrade upgrade! Trust me, NTFS *is* better. I speak as a sysadmin who has had to support it professionally. The biggest issue is that it's never been really documented by MS, and the Linux folks doing ntfs3g had to do a fair bit of reverse engineering and testing in consequence. But it's far more robust than FAT, and I truly can't understand why anyone would run 2K or XP on anything *but* NTFS. (The reason I've gotten elsewhere is "It's faster!" and my response is "Pics or it didn't happen! Post verifiable benchmarks that prove your contention." "It's faster" has *not* been my experience.) >> If I needed to run old 16bit DOS apps, I could do so in NTVDM, and >> they didn't have to be on a FAT filesystem to use them. > > NTVDM has regressed since XP. It's not as good anymore. Even XP wasn't > perfect. It's not a long-term solution. It's going away. MS doesn't > care (and hasn't) anymore. NTVDM mostly doesn't *exist* beyond XP. It's still present if you happen to be running Vista/7/8.1/10 on 32 bit hardware, but good luck even getting a 32 bit machine now unless you buy used. Current hardware is all 64 bit, and 64bit Windows dropped support for 16 bit apps. If you want to run DOS apps on 64bit Windows, you use WinXP mode in MS HyperV, or FreeDOS in VMWare or VirtualBox, or vDOS, a DOSBox fork specifically intended for running character mode DOS business apps on Windows. (Unlike DOSBox, it's not cross-platform, and only runs on Windows.). > It's not fair to pretend that "Windows is better than DOS!" because > they don't even barely half-support it anymore. We all know the > (previous) advantages. We'd all still be using Windows full-time if it > worked for us, but sadly it doesn't. They threw DOS away, and they're > already trying to do the same to anything written for Win7 or older. The number of people who still have actual need to run DOS is a vanishingly small fraction of the PC market. MS doesn't care about DOS, and *shouldn't*. The folks they consider their customers stopped running DOS and DOS apps decades back. There are a variety of reasons why Windows (*and* Linux) *are* better than DOS. Actual support for modern hardware is a really major one. Another is that there are things I can do in Windows and Linux that simply can't be done under DOS. More powerful hardware was developed, and OSes and apps that could use that power were written, to be *able* to do those things. The folks who *do* care about DOS are mostly hobbyists who like playing with retro tech. There are a couple of folks on this list who still run DOS as their production OS and do everything they need to do under it with DOS applications. I'm not one of them, and *can't* be. Most of what I do on computers these days can't be done under DOS. Ultimately, it comes down to money. The sort of support you would like is stuff the people who could *do* it expect to be *paid* for. It's what they do for a living. They aren't going to do it free for fun. There's next to no money in DOS these days, so it won't happen. The world changes, and we must change with it. Sitting still isn't normally an option. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and traffic patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols are consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity planning reports. http://sdm.link/zohomanageengine _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
