Thought I'd share my experience getting FreeDos working on my "new" machine. None of the official FreeDos installation methods liked its CD drive, and its USB port wasn’t bootable, so I had to find another way to install FreeDos. This is what worked for me. I’m sure there are other and possibly better ways.
The Pentium II machine I had bought had a nice installation of Windows 2000 Pro that I didn’t want to lose, but it only had a 4.3GB drive. I bought another larger IDE drive and moved Windows 2000 over to the new drive. Then I repartitioned the original drive into (2) FAT32 partitions, a 1GB and a 3.3GB. I copied everything on the FreeDos 1.3 Live CD over to the 1GB partition using Windows 2000. Then I disconnected the new drive with Windows 2000 and made the old 4.3GB drive the master. Next, I rebooted to the Windows Live CD without installing anything. At that point, I removed the CD and changed over to the 1GB partition [D:] with the copy of the Live CD and executed setup.bat, which installed FreeDos in the empty 3.3GB partition [C:]. The installation completed and rebooted to the new installation of FreeDos without any complaints. Needless to say, FreeDos doesn’t recognize the CD drive or the USB port, but that was no surprise, since I couldn’t use them for the installation, either. For now, I have to boot into Windows 2000 to get files in and out of my FreeDos partition. It has a floppy, but none of my other computers have one. At present, I’m going into the BIOS and changing my boot drive, which is a bit of a hassle. In my long-ago experience, these computers were prone to corrupting the BIOS with too many changes. Eventually, I’ll setup some type of MBR menu. I did order an external USB floppy to make it easier to trade small files with my other computers. And the best news is my LAN came up first try! On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 12:59 PM Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 11/11/2020 9:10 AM, Marv wrote: > > Ralf - I gave up on that motherboard with the onboard PCIe Realtek network > adapter and picked up a circa 1999 Intel Pentium II machine with (2) > Adaptec ANA-6911 PCI network adapter boards. I'm pretty sure I found the > right NDIS drivers for them. It also has a spare ISA slot, so I have that > option, too. I'm hoping to install FreeDos on it later today. > > Well, that sounds a bit like "from fire into the pan"... ;-) > > Would have to take a look at what those cards actually are to see what > kind of driver they would use. > > One thing that should generally be kept in mind is that DOS (any DOS) > predates the widespread use of (TCP)IP networking. In it's "networking > heydays", DOS machines were usually networking using other protocols (and > hardware infrastructure!) like IPX, SPX and a lot more proprietary > protocols. IP networking didn't really become a thing until the early '90s, > and by that time, Windows had take over and pretty much all hardware > manufacturers saw DOS driver support (not only for NICs!) just as an after > thought. > > So usually pre 2000 NICs are fairly well supported and should be the first > choice when using both real iron or a VM. NE2000, 3C905, RTL8129, RTL8139, > those are commonly among the well supported cards. > > Anything pretty much made past 2000, it becomes a real hit and miss, first > because manufacture tried to take advantage of the much higher CPU power to > offload some of the workload from their hardware and implement at least > some functionality in software (the infamous "WinModems", but also NICs, > disk controllers,...), while much newer products try to utilize > technologies that in general not "real mode DOS" friendly anymore, like > PCIe and other fluff. Even USB is basically a royal pain in the posterior... > > Ralf > > > <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient&utm_term=icon> > Virus-free. > www.avast.com > <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient&utm_term=link> > <#m_6172992070244809432_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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