OK, so here's one thing that I did that didn't work and one thing that I
did that did work. Obviously, the first thing I did didn't. I had a
box laying around that had PATA drives in it which the old laptop used.
Fortunately, I had a 2.5" to 3.5" PATA drive adapter. I didn't want to
mess with the drive that was already in that box so I pulled another one
out that I had in my stores and attached it as primary master and the
laptop drive (the target) as its slave. It turns out the drive I pulled
out already had FreeDOS 1.3 on it. It booted just fine and both drives
were seen properly, as reported by FDISK. At the command line, I issued
the command "FDISK 2 /MBR" to rewrite the laptop drive's MBR. There was
no complaint and the command seemed to execute properly. Note that
before this, the drive will boot FD 1.3 when told from the CD but not
directly. When put back in the laptop, this behavior did not change.
It still would not boot directly but would from the CD.
Now to the thing that worked. I put it back into the helper box with
its original HD which had OS/2 on it. Again, the laptop drive was slave
to the OS/2 master. In an OS/2 command shell, I issued the command "lvm
2 /newmbr". Back into the laptop and it now works - boots directly into
the laptop drive. I'll leave it to the experts to say what was wrong
(something I did perhaps) but I know what fixed it so I know what's right.
Anyway, thanks to all who helped.
-Rocky
On 10/14/2024 5:25 AM, John Vella via Freedos-user wrote:
I had a lot of trouble installing FreeDOS onto an old laptop, and here
is how I got it to work.
Do you have a Windows computer? I have only tested this using Windows,
but it should work on a Mac. I'm not sure about Linux, as I haven't
run any virtualization software on Linux before.
I installed Oracle Virtualbox and created a virtual DOS machine. The
important part here is to create a VHD hard drive, so you can access
the files later.
Once FreeDOS is installed on the virtual machine, connect the hard
drive you wish to use to your computer. I am making many assumptions
here, but you should be able to use a USB adapter,
Format the drive to FAT32. At this point you should be able to get
your Virtualbox DOS machine to see the drive, (I am at work, and
cannot give you the exact commands, but if you're really stuck, I can
look it up later)
From your virtual DOS machine format the drive, using the /S switch,
to transfer the system files.
I did try and xcopy the contents of the C drive to the external drive
from the virtual DOS machine, but feel free to try "xcopy c:\*.* d:\
/s /e" without the quotes, and assuming that your external drive is D:\
If that doesn't work, exit the virtual machine, and find where the
virtual hard drive, (.vhd) is saved, and open it with 7-Zip.
You can then drag the contents over to the external drive.
This is how I managed to transfer the FreeDOS files to an external
hard drive, and once I'd plugged it into the laptop, it worked just fine.
Hope this helps.
Let us know how you get on, or if you need any further information.
On Mon, 14 Oct 2024 at 10:59, G.W. Haywood via Freedos-user
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
Hi there,
On Sun, 13 Oct 2024, Michael Rakijas via Freedos-user wrote:
> ... I changed back to the 1.4 GB cartridge ... FreeDOS would not
reinstall.
> ... Something really funky is afoot.
I'm not sure the conclusion there is warranted but I'll admit that I
haven't been carefully following the thread.
Be aware of the difference between a Master Boot Record (a disc which
has been partitioned) and a Volume Boot Record (a disc which has not).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_sector#Partition_tables
If it were my drive I'd wipe it clean with a random Linux box using
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device_id>
and then format it with three 512MByte FAT16 partitions using whatever
formatting utililty was handy (obviously one of the partitions would
not be quite as big as 512MBytes). During the formatting I'd tell it
I wanted a DOS MBR on there at sector 0. If the formatting utility
can't write a DOS MBR then under DOS you can try something like
fdisk /mbr
or search online for other ways of writing a MBR. The MBR is tiny
and it shouldn't take more than a fraction of a second to write it.
If this or the formatting utility say that sector 0 is bad you know
where the problem is. I don't think I've ever seen a drive which had
any good sectors at all which had a bad sector 0, so I think that's
perhaps unlikely but it *is* possible.
Assuming this formatting went well enough I'd try installing FreeDOS
from a USB stick (because that's what I keep lying around, I never
bother with CDs any more) making sure that I use the defaults for
*everything* so that nobody could later suggest I've done anything
funky if I need to explain what I did. I'd make copious notes about
what I did and what I saw in my lab book. If you don't keep a lab
book now would be a good time to start. I still have mine from the
late 1970s. The first thing you write in there each time you open it
is preferably a horizontal ruled line followed by the date and time,
and what you plan to do in the following section. Then *everything*
that you do and see. Not just the bits that seem interesting.
If you don't get anywhere get back to us with all your notes. If it
seems like a lot of notes, scan them and put them on a file sharing
service somewhere for us. The first thing we want to know that the
disc is good. That at least shouldn't be too hard to establish.
--
73,
Ged.
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