> On Jul 4, 2025, at 9:45 PM, Lutalli via Freedos-user > <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Update: I tried again and now it shows "Non-system disk or disk error". > > On Sat, Jul 5, 2025, 03:28 Lutalli <lutall...@gmail.com > <mailto:lutall...@gmail.com>> wrote: > I'm happy to hear that I don't have to worry about VASK being used by the OS > post install! That was a big concern for me. > > Alright this is what I have done so far: On VirtualBox, I created a virtual > DOS machine, set the hard disk to HDD (I chose this because all the tutorials > about PockDOS I've read used HDD as the format of virtual disk images), then > installed FreeDOS 1.4 using the floppy edition successfully. > > (Even though it was on my laptop, it took a small while. And indeed > decompression is CPU intensive - The installation even made my laptop's fans > spin a lot. I can image if I actually did it on my Jornada 720, it would take > a LONG time.) > > Now I have an HDD file, roughly 20MB, that supposedly has FreeDOS 1.4 > installed. I copied the HDD file to my mobile device. Then I made a virtual > disk redirected to that HDD on PocketDOS, and let it boot from that disk. > However it shows "No Operating System Present"... At the moment I have no > idea why. On VirtualBox, I can still run FreeDOS without any problem.
Do not know what setting you are using for "HDD format”. VirtualBox provides 3 format types. 1) VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) - Default. 2) VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) 3) VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) Those can be Dynamically allocated (Default) or Fixed Size. With the addition of being split into files less 2GB each. Again, I have never used PocketDOS and have know Idea what formats it supports. But generally for maximum compatibility, I usually use "VMDK, Fixed Size, No Splitting”. Those settings will output 2 files for the hard disk. One is called SOMETHING.vmdk. It should be under 1Kb and contains information about the virtual machine disk image. The other will be called SOMETHING-flat.vmdk with is the actual disk image. That “flat” image is just an ‘IMG’ file with a different extension. That “flat" can be mounted easily on macOS by simply changing its extension to “IMG” and double clicking. No special software required. They can also be mounted on Linux and Unix machines by using a loopback device. They can also be used with other virtual machines like QEMU and VMware with almost no difficulty. It can It can be even written directly to USB media or a hard disk using tools like “dd” on macOS, Linux or Unix. The simply boot the USB or hard disk. On a side note… A VMDK image is provided as the FreeDOS USB installer image(s). QEMU is used to create that “flat” image. However, the associated VMDK description file is generated programmatically by the RBE. (The RBE stands for ”Release Build Environment.” It is the thing that creates the various FreeDOS install media for a release.) Once you have a compatible disk image format, installed FreeDOS and have transferred the files to your other machine running PocketDOS, it should boot. As a suggestion, maybe you should create a blank machine in PocketDOS. Then, compress it using zip. Since it is empty, it will every small. Copy that zip over to to your machine running VirtualBox and extract it. Now, possibly just use it directly in VirtualBox. Or, create a new VirtualBox machine using the existing Virtual Disk Image created by PocketDOS. Once FreeDOS is installed, copy the drive back and it really really should work. :-)
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