Hi! I am not sure if we have understoood Jon's question correctly.
Not so much a question just as a review of what I was able to achieve with the plan of action Liam had suggested back in March and the constraints existing in my configuration. As I said, I have the most crucial bits of my configuration working.
Does he need any changes for the BIOS at all? Maybe the issue is simply that MS DOS can only use the first 8 GB of your disk, with at most 2 GB per partition, because it is FAT16 CHS only?
Yeah, but I don't really need more than that. The original plan had been to boot everything from the SATA disk (SSD, using an expanded version of the partition layout from when the machine was single-IDE) with the IDE disk (magnetic) reserved for swap, but MS-DOS simply will not see anything on the SATA card, so a 2 GB partition on the IDE disk does nicely for it. Where things get a bit sticky is: 1) That MS-DOS will quite happily deal with a 2 GiB FAT16 partition on the IDE drive (and even a second one above it), but BIOS can only address the first 1.3 GB of the IDE drive due to the interaction of the reported CHS geometry of the drive with the BIOS's CHS limits. Ideally, I'd like to do something like: 2GB FAT16 (DOS) -> Several GB FAT32 (Win98) -> Linux swap on the rest of the drive But I'm using Grub legacy (because I ran into trouble earlier on this machine getting Grub2 to boot both DOS 6 and Win95, I forget the exact details), and Grub legacy uses BIOS for disk access on the IDE disk (it deals quite happily with the SATA disk), so all the entry points for OSes on the IDE disk have to be below the 1.3 GB mark. This will mean some partition juggling. 2) Win98 drivers exist for the SATA card, so in principle, I should be able to install it in the existing Win95 FAT32 partition on the SATA disk, but the install environment is straight DOS and doesn't see the SATA disk, and while it gives a nice overview of the install process that includes loading drivers for hardware, that's *after* "install the OS to disk" and "reboot" steps (rather than the very first thing like any sensible OS installer). It even seems to struggle with anything other than a FAT16 CHS partition (FAT32 isn't visible, FAT16 LBA is visible but it screams when trying to actually access it). This may have to do with the install CD I chose, but unless different media presents me with more options, it looks like the existing partition on the SATA disk will only be usable as a data partition after the install is complete.
Many old BIOSes already work fine for the first 128/137 GB if you have a LBA FAT32 DOS such as FreeDOS, EDR-DOS or Win98 DOS 7 :-) And as far as I have understood, he can boot either from onboard IDE (PATA) controllers or from his add-on SATA controller card.
I'm able to boot from the SATA card if the IDE drive is on the secondary IDE channel, but not if it's on the primary channel. If the IDE drive is on the secondary channel, it's invisible to any sort of DOS (including FreeDOS, which sees all FAT partitions of any type on both drives if the IDE disk is on the primary channel). So the IDE drive has to be on the primary channel. This complicates boot a bit, but Grub can see and launch anything on either drive from either drive, so it just means that Grub has to be on the IDE drive. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
