On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 5:25 PM Jen via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> I haven’t tried reformatting the partition and running the installation again > yet; I suspect it will still do the same thing. Should I try that? > Any ideas what I’ve done wrong or why it might not be working? You may need to reformat. I installed FreeDOS years back on the hard drive of an ancient notebook I had been given. I partitioned the HD to have a 20GB slice formatted NTFS from which I booted Win2K, a couple of 8GB slices formatted as Linux ext4 from which I booted Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, a swap partition for the Linux OSes, respectively, and a 2GB partition formatted as FAT32 where I installed FreeDOS. I used Linux Grub2 to create a boot menu from which I could boot the chosen OS at runtime. I had to do a *lot* of fiddling to successfully boot FreeDOS in that configuration, and I don't even know just which fiddle did the trick. (A problem which required reinstalling Win2K broke it and I never did get it to work again.) I would create a *2GB* boot partition and format it FAT16, and install FreeDOS to it. My recollection is that FAT32 support was a work in progress in FreeDOS when real development ended. DOS dated from the days of FAT16, and a 2GB volume was the largest one DOS could access. FAT32 was developed precisely to remove the need to create lots of 2GB volumes seen as separate drives so DOS could access them, but Windows 3.X was already in common deployment, and FAT32 was intended to make life easier for Windows. I think your fundamental problem is that FreeDOS cannot successfully boot from a 7.8GB partition formatted as FAT32. It may be able to access other larger partitions formatted FAT32 and seen by DOS as D:, E: or the like, once FreeDOS *is* booted, but it cannot boot *from* one. > --- Jen ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
