If you boot from the USB drive, all you need do is run the sys command,
and give it the drive letter of the hd, then remove the usb thumb drive,
and the hd should boot just fine.
sys d:
should do it in your case.
On 3/18/2026 1:01 AM, Ray Davison via Freedos-user wrote:
Eric Auer wrote:
MBR is limited to 2 TB disk size unless sectors are > 512 Bytes
and MBR is a bit weird because you need a chain of partitions
if you have more than just the primary ones. in the last few decades
Previous to the current attempt every laptop I have setup has had two
versions of Win, nothing else. Win provided the boot manager. The
first thing I don't like about the Win boot manager is that it is
hooked into the BIOS. I "grew up" believing the BIOS belonged to me
and no OS could screw with it. The laptop I am working now got wiped
because a Win "update" left me with a black screen and I could not
boot either Win partition. That should be impossible. Win should be
limited to destroying only the partition it is "updating".
Every desktop, in the last few decades, has had only a single primary
- two if you count the extended wrapper. That is the system I am
trying to build. This laptop shipped with a 1Tb HDD. I could have
FreeDOS, two Win, and a half dozen Linux and never fill that drive. I
don't keep junk on a working box, I have a storage box for that, or at
least I did until Win11 killed my LAN, and that is what started all this.
Which steps are still missing? You should be able to boot it
on a laptop which still supports BIOS / legacy boot and is
not limited to only booting EFI / UEFI. For EFI-only laptops
you would need a suitable CSM to boot DOS. People work on that.
First, "Bad or missing Command Interpreter" is an "old friend". It has
been part of my FreeDOS experience, but not lately, because I have not
tried to install FreeDOS lately. Somehow I always got past that.
The install USB boots as C:\. I can switch to the HDD as D:\. I can
navigate the HDD.
Does the fact that the USB can boot, guarantee that the HDD can be
made to boot?
Ray
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