Hello everyone, I have an old 1995-vintage pentium system running a triple-boot of Debian, MS-DOS 6.22, and Windows 95. I would like to install FreeDOS along side MS-DOS on the DOS 6.22 partition, but have been running into some trouble. The machine has a CD drive, but cannot boot from CD, and I cannot get the FreeDOS 1.2 install floppy to simultaneously recognize the CD drive and the HDD. (Actually I can get a configuration where the CD drive seems to be recognized by the installer, which then complains that it can't find any fixed disks, but when I drop to a shell, I can browse the HDD but not the CD-drive). I have tried moving the floppy contents to a subdirectory on the target drive, but the install scripts seem to have too many lines that assume that the directory structure from the floppy is at the root of the drive in question, and I don't really want to drop the floppy contents directly into the root of my DOS partition because they contain an autoexec.bat (instead of fdauto.bat), so if I'm not careful I could end up blowing away the existing autoexec.bat on the drive. I suppose I could just drop components in one by one, but that sounds like a lot of work.
So I have a few questions: 1) Can anybody think of anything that might resolve the drive detection issue? 2) Is there any alternative to or subset of the installer files on the floppy image such that I can boot into my existing DOS installation and pull everything off the CD, considering that preliminary steps like partitioning or formatting my HDD are neither needed nor desired? 3) Is there some Grand Unified Tarball that I can just unpack to the mountpoint of my DOS partition in Debian (rather than unpacking the zips for individual packages one by one)? 4) Failing that, what's the minimum set of packages from freedos.org/software that I'd have to unpack on the MS-DOS partition to pull down the rest from the net? I assume FDNPKG at least. Does it have any dependencies? Also, I see a package "FDIMPLES" that seems to imply that FDINST is an available package manager, which FDIMPLES uses, and I see a corresponding "FDI sources" package but I don't see any sign of a binaries package for FDI (or is it all scripts?). Pulling down packages from the net from within DOS isn't something I really want to do, though I can if all else fails. I have a network stack installed on my MS-DOS partition, but mostly use it on my LAN and try not to have anything but Linux talk to the outside internet. In my current configuration, autoexec.bat actually loads the driver briefly, syncs the system time with a local NTP server (the RTC battery died long ago), and then unloads the driver again, so I'm not actually even on the network under DOS most of the time. Jon Brase _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
