> I screwed up. I was playing with dosemu and now I can't boot dos from
> lilo or dosemu. The freedos hdimage works fine. To the best of my
> recollection, here's what I did: I started by setting the hdimage
> variable in the config file to /dev/hda1, my dos (Win95) partition.
> When I ran dosemu, I got the "Starting Windows..." message then
> dosemu froze, so I killed the process. I saw something in the docs
> about pressing F4, F5, and F8 for a "dual boot" option. I didn't
> really understand what this was but I did it anyway. This time I got
> a dos prompt. Woohoo! Then I tried to run a program (one that I
> later learned won't run under dosemu anyway, because it uses that ring
> 0 thingie). Either dosemu crashed or I killed it, I don't remember
> which. That was the last time I was able to use my native dos. I can
> still mount /dev/hda1 and see all the files.
>
> I meddled with forces I didn't understand and I got burned. I would
> be grateful If someone could help me resurrect my dos partition.
> Thanks.
dos does that ocassionally, even if you don't use dosemu. If you use
dosemu 0.98.6 or later (latest version is 0.98.8 from ftp.dosemu.org)
and use the bootdir
method described in the documentation, it will be much harder for dos
to screw itself like that since it can't write directly to the filesystem
but must use normal file operations through Linux.
To make dos bootable again, you probably need to find a DOS boot floppy,
boot off it and type "system C:"
Also you will want to use a different msdos.sys when booting in dosemu
from booting natively so that it doesn't try to start Windows when you
boot dos (you need a line that says "BootGUI=0" as described in the
documentation)
