If anyone of you face these problems like me 1. CD drive not working 2. Freedos crashes and reboots
then this is for you. Solutions 1. The driver udvd.sys supplied in Freedos doesn't really work on PCem. This is a pretty big problem because not only the old systems emulated by PCem can't possibly boot from CD, the provided Freedos boot floppy can't read from the legacy install CD too, so installation was impossible. I use the CD Drive driver from a Win 9x bootdisk instead. To do this, i) Mount the provided boot floppy image. I use PassMark OSF Mount. ii) Get the CD Drive drivers. I got mine from a Win95 bootdisk from http://www.putergeek.com. The files are - CDROM.SYS - MSCDEX.EXE iii) Copy them to the Freedos boot floppy. I put mine under a folder in A:\MDOSDRV iv) Modify the following files (A:\FDCONFIG.SYS) - add "DEVICE=\MDOSDRV\CDROM.SYS /D:IDE0" (A:\AUTOEXEC.BAT) - add "\MDOSDRV\MSCDEX.EXE /D:IDE0 /L:X" - comment out any line mentioning UDVD2.SYS and SHSUCDX by adding REM at the beginning. Eg. (Line 16) rem DEVLOAD /H /Q %dosdir%\BIN\UDVD2.SYS /D:FDCD0001 and that's it. You can now use this floppy image for installation. To install the drivers after installation, i) Copy CDROM.SYS & MSCDEX.EXE to your hard disk. I place mine in A:\MDOSDRV ii) Similarly, modify C:\FDCONFIG.SYS and C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT to load the drivers with the same parameters used for the boot floppy. 2. This seems to be a problem with the original configuration for JEMM386 and JEMMEX (Expanded Memory drivers). This is what I used instead. (FDCONFIG.SYS) DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\JEMMEX.EXE I=D0000-EFFFF VERBOSE ( Explaination) "I=D0000-EFFFF" Forrce JEMMEX to use only Block D and Block E in the Upper Memory Area (UMA) as Upper Memory Blocks (UMB), because other blocks are possibly in use by peripherals & BIOS. More on the memory blocks here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory#640_KB_barrier. I tried to use X=xxxx-xxxx before to exclude Block A -C and Block F, but JEMMEX seems to refuse using multiple X option parameters. "VERBOSE" To print out for message on screen just to see what's wrong. | | Virus-free. www.avg.com |
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