On Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:07:50 +0200 Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
> Hi Jon, > > for your advanced multi boot project, you could boot FreeDOS > from floppy and use the SHSU... drivers to open the ISO file > of the install CD as if it were a CD drive, after using your > Windows or Debian to copy the ISO to your DOS/Win95 harddisk. Unfortunately, the ISO would very nearly fill up that partition. While I'm not using any such software now, I had at one point had at one point been playing with ancient software on the machine in question that choked on HDDs over 8 GiB, and the largest disk I had under that limit was 4 GiB, so all three systems on the disk have fairly limited storage available. I've got a fair number of old DOS games installed on the DOS partition, so space is even more limited. If I put the ISO on that partition, I wouldn't have any space left to unpack anything. Now, I could prune stuff off the partition or move it to one of the other partitions, or I could get a screwdriver, image the disk to a larger HDD and then expand all the partitions out, so it's not that I absolutely can't drop the ISO in and mount it, but given the time and effort involed in those courses of action I do want to be sure that freeing up disk space and dropping the ISO in is my best option before I commit to either variant of that action. > The ISO has plenty of ZIPs to use with the package manager, > but you will be unable to see most of the apps which do the > install process, as those are in a boot disk image inside a > separate area of the ISO ;-) As an alternative to booting from the FreeDOS installer floppy and mounting the ISO, can you comment on the feasibility of unpacking the package manager into the existing MS-DOS installation and working from the CD, given that MS-DOS is not having any trouble with the CD drive? What minimal package set would I need to unpack manually? I assume FDNPKG, anything else? Is there any configuration that I'd need to do to point it at the install CD? > You can manually use the package manager to install the FreeDOS > packages of your choice to some FreeDOS specific directory on > your harddisk and you can use special options of SYS to create > a FreeDOS boot sector file and then add that file to your boot > menu, such as GRUB, instead of using SYS the normal way which > would overwrite your MS DOS or Win95 boot sectors. > > I would NOT use the normal install script, as that does not have > specific precautions to behave well in a system such as your PC > which has already 2 MS "DOS" style operating systems installed. Good to know. I don't know how common paralell DOS installs like what I'm planning are, but but given the fdauto.bat/fdconfig.sys convention they don't seem to be entirely unanticipated, so it might be good for FreeDOS to have an installer, or at least a standardized, how-to-ized manual install procedure for that use case. Likewise, given that I've found a separate Linux partition to be a very nice administrative environment for a DOS install on bare hardware, and the fact that the VM/emulation use case seems to be one that's forseen for many FreeDOS installs, it might be good to have a userspace installer for *nix and/or Win32 that can install FreeDOS with a user-selected package set to an empty FAT filesystem, either in a parition or an image file (let's call the concept "supersys"). Jon Brase _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
