> > On Apr 26, 2025, at 7:22 PM, dkolb2056--- wrote: > > > > Hello! > > > > I have Windows 10 and Ubuntu both installed to dual boot. I would > > also like to dedicate 1-2 GB for a FreeDOS booting partition, so I > > can choose to boot it as well. > > > > However, as far as I have seen so far, the only way you can do all > > boots is to install FeeeDOS first, then shrink the partition and install > > other operating systems on top of it. I do not want to do this, because > > I have been using Windows 10 and Ubuntu for a while now, and a lot of > > my programs that I have not yet published are on them. Can somebody > > help me? Is this possible? > >
On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 6:42 PM Jerome Shidel wrote: > > Hi, > > I would highly recommend NOT doing that. > > You basically just said “I have a lot of stuff I do not want to > loose on my computer. How can I do something that is very risky without > losing everything important on my drive?” > > The only good answer is “DO NOT DO IT!” +1 Messing with partitions that already exist is tricky. I don't want to see you lose data because you tried to resize something. > Why just not use a Virtual Machine? It is much safer and you don’t > even need to reboot. Plus, depending on you drive partitioning, you > can use the same FreeDOS VM in both Windows and Linux. [..] +1 I came here to say just that. A virtual machine will be a lot easier and won't risk damaging your Windows or Linux systems. Jerome mentioned VirtualBox and that runs great on both Linux and Windows, so I recommend that. https://www.virtualbox.org/ If your Linux system is able to read and write data on your Windows partition (or have some other "shared" partition that's visible to both Windows and Linux, to share data between the two systems) then you could store the FreeDOS virtual disk image on the "Windows" side, and access that disk image from both Windows or Linux (whichever you are booted into). If you aren't able to view the Windows partition from Linux (or otherwise don't have some kind of "shared" partition that both can see) then I'd recommend buying a USB flash drive and storing your FreeDOS virtual disk image on that. Whenever you want to boot FreeDOS in the virtual machine, just be sure to plug in the USB flash drive first. USB flash storage is slow .. but on the other hand, hardware from the 1980s and 1990s was also slow compared to today's hardware, so you can pretend it's the "retro experience." :-) > But if you really want to run it on bare metal, consider installing > FreeDOS onto a USB flash drive. Such an install won’t require > modifying your internal drives. It also gives you a portable version > of FreeDOS that can be used on any system that can boot it from USB. A > thumb drive with the capacity of a few gigabytes is plenty for nearly > all DOS installations. +1 A bootable USB flash drive would be a good workaround solution, if you want to boot FreeDOS on your computer -- on the actual hardware. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
