Hi Paul,

> Have you tried to run the installer under DOSEMU2?

With which type of drive configuration? I normally use
a Linux directory as C: drive, so you can neither format
nor partition that. Interestingly, WHICHFAT believes
such drives are FAT16, but CHKDSK and DOSFSCK will tell
you that they are not sector accessible at all. This is
due to some magic performed by DOSEMU2 to make the drive
bootable. Technically, it turns into something similar
to a network drive after booting. With classic DOSEMU,
you needed no extra drivers for this. With DOSEMU2, you
have to load an "EMUFS" driver to enable writes. If you
forget to load it, FreeDOS will not show error messages
about writes, but written data gets forgotten as soon
as you look away for a moment and never reaches Linux.

If you configure DOSEMU2 to use a disk image as your C:
drive, you can format it to any FAT type you like, with
some effort. Very useful for testing DOSFSCK and FORMAT.

The problem is that harddisk images are a bit special:
An 128 byte header with a magic and the geometry, then
an image of a partitioned disk with only one partition.

DOSEMU came with tools to create such images, but for
FAT32, you have to manually hex-edit the partition type
in the "MBR" of the image.

So whether you can run the installer in DOSEMU2 depends
on how you have configured it, but you probably want to
make sure to NOT let the installer partition or format
the disk. Just tell it to install the files to some
existing C: drive. And again, if the drive is actually
a Linux directory, you have to make sure to load EMUFS
to be able to properly write that. You could DEVLOAD it
before manually running the installer, I guess, because
adding it to the ISO of the installer would create the
risk of using a version mismatching the version which
comes with your DOSEMU2, which defaults to having some
extra drive containing specific drivers and tools such
as EMUFS (load SYS first, then run COM), UMB, EMS, CDROM,
SYSTEM, LREDIR, EXITEMU, EMUSOUND etc. For example by
running EMUSOUND /e your BLASTER etc. variable is set
based on your DOSEMU2 config, so you do not need to
manually keep your autoexec in sync with your config.

The UMB, EMS and CDROM drivers do what you can guess:
You cannot use EMM386 or UMBPCI in DOSEMU2 and because
no IDE/SATA controllers are simulated, only BIOS disks,
you cannot use CD/DVD drivers for hardware drives either.

> When it partition the Linux directory, it give some error (I don't remember).
> 
> And when it come to format the Linux directory, it loops 3 error messages 
> never stopping.
> 
> So yes, DOSEMU2 do have some special needs...

You can certainly say that last thing, but having a full
FreeDOS install of course gives you many nice apps in
DOSEMU2, just like a full install in any other context.

Regards, Eric



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