Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi John, - InitDiskWARNING: using suspect partition Pri:1 FS 0b: with calculated values 81-194-63 instead of 75-254-63 BIOS and partitioning disagree about CHS geometry and your partition type 0b is FAT32 CHS. You could switch to FAT32 LBA where geometry is irrelevant. Note that Windows does not show this warning, it just tries. Also note that many fdisk-like partitioning tools can delete partition boot sectors as side-effect of edits which makes the partition look unformatted and empty. What I meant was to ONLY change the partition type, a byte in the partition table, from 0b to 0c. Or simply ignore the warning from FreeDOS, of course... Now that I think about it, it's not much of a difference. It may just be your SuSE boot manager (stage 1.5? stage2?) hidden somewhere. No. The geometry warning is from DOS itself. Stage 1.5 and 2 are something from GRUB boot manager, not specific to SuSE. If you use some older SuSE version, it probably uses LiLo. Since you say Win98, I'm assuming this is FAT32, which means you may have a backup boot sector somewhere. Win98 FAT32 typically does, but the message suggests that you installed DOS on the partition. You can of course use a Win98 DOS 7.x boot disk and just SYS C: again if the rest of Windows is still there... I just tried to load Suse. The functions key for Linux both were ignored, staying in a loop asking for a function key press. I think the loader was Lilo. This was installed several years ago (5+). The computer has 16 MB RAM. I mainly use it as a DOS computer. I was running the DOS of Windows 98, yes FAT32. That is why I wanted to run the Fat32 version of fd. I use 4dos as my command processor. You can install FreeDOS and Windows 98 on the same partition: Use FreeDOS SYS or another tool to backup the boot sector of Win98 and make backup copies of command.com, config.sys and autoexec.bat before you SYS to FreeDOS. Use a boot manager, maybe even the simple metaboot for FreeDOS, to select one of the two boot sectors (FreeDOS or Win98) at each boot. You have to use some careful configurations tricks to keep both systems out of the way of each other. For example there has to be fdconfig.sys for FreeDOS, which takes priority there, so Windows can have config.sys for itself. This allows you to let FreeDOS use another file instead of autoexec.bat, because FreeCOM allows selecting another file in the SHELL line in fdconfig.sys - if you want to use 4DOS, you have to check if 4DOS can do the same. Also, make sure that if Windows 98 uses c:\command.com then your FreeDOS shell, be it 4DOS or FreeCOM, of course has to be somewhere else :-) So if this was not the right way, how am I supposed to install freedos on a multipartitioned drive? Can I write over the fd with lilo. My concern is that I have a lot of important data on this DOS computer. If the computer has important data, doing a backup now seems quite important: This thread mentions that the computer has 16 MB RAM and the last time I ran SuSE (6.x, maybe 5.x) on such hardware was 10 years ago. The harddisk must be very old unless you replaced it recently... Note that that SuSE version ran Linux 2.2 which did not even support USB yet. Regards, Eric -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS/V
On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 04:02:58 +0100, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote: If that just returns a charset-specific static table, maybe it would be some sort of charset rendering and keyboard / input method driver that actually implements this, not the kernel? Sure, it could also be a TSR. I forgot how flexible DOS is in API extensibility. :) And importantly, note how much of DOS (and tools) do NOT have to know about the DBCS nature of text: It makes no difference for FIND if you search for a four letter word or for four bytes which MEAN two DBCS characters. Among other things, this is thanks to having a lead byte / next byte distinction and having no upper or lower case in CJK languages if I remember correctly. Actually, it makes a big difference for FIND, which why I mentioned it. While leading bytes of double byte characters all have the highest bit set, the following bytes do not. So searching for the ASCII character i would give you incorrect results, as 69h is a perfectly valid second byte of a double byte character, for example of ナ, katakana syllable na (8369h). Additionally, case insensitive searching works by comparing pairs of characters converted to the same case, so searching for i would not only find lines containing ナ, but also オ, katakana syllable o (8349h), and other characters. For the same reason, FreeCOM does not have to care. Well, it does for sorting filenames in the DIR command. :) SORT is a different story, but I do not know whether DOS is supposed to include Japanese etc aware SORT or whether that is normally part of a separately available package of JKC tools. Also, what license do such packages have? I don't know. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS/V
On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 06:36:49 +0100, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Matej Horvat matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si wrote: PS: I just wrote all that and found this: http://nokonoko365.cocolog-nifty.com/blogfile/freedos/index.html Is that third party software for Japanese support or what? No, according to Chrome's translation, it seems to just be somebody trying FreeDOS + Windows 3.1 under VirtualPC, nothing more. No, I meant this post: http://nokonoko365.cocolog-nifty.com/blogfile/2011/01/freedos-a3f2.html Look at the screenshots. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi, On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote: - InitDiskWARNING: using suspect partition Pri:1 FS 0b: with calculated values 81-194-63 instead of 75-254-63 BIOS and partitioning disagree about CHS geometry and your partition type 0b is FAT32 CHS. You could switch to FAT32 LBA where geometry is irrelevant. Note that Windows does not show this warning, it just tries. How exactly shall he do this? I vaguely remember having to do similar once before, but I can't remember how I did it. I had thought BTTR's BOOTMGR, but a quick look doesn't show any (obvious) way to change partition type. Maybe I just used GParted, dunno. Or maybe sys config c:\kernel.sys FORCELBA=1 would work here?? Since you say Win98, I'm assuming this is FAT32, which means you may have a backup boot sector somewhere. Win98 FAT32 typically does, but the message suggests that you installed DOS on the partition. You can of course use a Win98 DOS 7.x boot disk and just SYS C: again if the rest of Windows is still there... Assuming he still has the disks. Otherwise TestDisk might be a good option. You can install FreeDOS and Windows 98 on the same partition: Yes, but that's complex, and that doesn't sound like what we wants to do. So if this was not the right way, how am I supposed to install freedos on a multipartitioned drive? Can I write over the fd with lilo. My concern is that I have a lot of important data on this DOS computer. If the computer has important data, doing a backup now seems quite important: Yes, backup backup backup. This thread mentions that the computer has 16 MB RAM and the last time I ran SuSE (6.x, maybe 5.x) on such hardware was 10 years ago. The harddisk must be very old unless you replaced it recently... Note that that SuSE version ran Linux 2.2 which did not even support USB yet. Presumably it works well enough for him. Though the way things are these days, you can't run hardly anything without tons of RAM. I think minimum is often i686 PAE and 128 MB RAM, and most don't even bother supporting that. Swapping like mad is not a lot of fun. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS/V
Hi, On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 5:13 AM, Matej Horvat matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si wrote: On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 06:36:49 +0100, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Matej Horvat matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si wrote: PS: I just wrote all that and found this: http://nokonoko365.cocolog-nifty.com/blogfile/freedos/index.html Is that third party software for Japanese support or what? No, according to Chrome's translation, it seems to just be somebody trying FreeDOS + Windows 3.1 under VirtualPC, nothing more. No, I meant this post: http://nokonoko365.cocolog-nifty.com/blogfile/2011/01/freedos-a3f2.html Look at the screenshots. The original website seems to have disappeared. I did check Wayback, and the Win32 .ZIP sfx (PE .EXE) downloads okay. It contains an .IMA (floppy image) file with various tools, but I'm unsure of the licenses, and I don't see any sources. So I'm not sure how useful it is (by default) right now. I'm moreso thinking of keyboard and fonts vs. just localized older versions of Edlin or FreeCOM or whatever. Well, I didn't check too close, it's hard enough relying on Chrome to translate! -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi, On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote: Win98 FAT32 typically does, but the message suggests that you installed DOS on the partition. You can of course use a Win98 DOS 7.x boot disk and just SYS C: again if the rest of Windows is still there... Assuming he still has the disks. Otherwise TestDisk might be a good option. I forgot about this. Not sure of the details, but maybe?? it'll help. http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/sys.htm SYS OPTIONS: /OEM:W9xuse MS Win9x DOS compatible settings. default is /OEM[:AUTO], select DOS based on existing files. /NOBAKBS : skips copying boot sector to backup bs, FAT32 only else ignored -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
On 11/09/2013 09:34 AM, Rugxulo wrote: Hi, On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote: - InitDiskWARNING: using suspect partition Pri:1 FS 0b: with calculated values 81-194-63 instead of 75-254-63 BIOS and partitioning disagree about CHS geometry and your partition type 0b is FAT32 CHS. You could switch to FAT32 LBA where geometry is irrelevant. Note that Windows does not show this warning, it just tries. How exactly shall he do this? I vaguely remember having to do similar once before, but I can't remember how I did it. I had thought BTTR's BOOTMGR, but a quick look doesn't show any (obvious) way to change partition type. Maybe I just used GParted, dunno. Or maybe sys config c:\kernel.sys FORCELBA=1 would work here?? Since you say Win98, I'm assuming this is FAT32, which means you may have a backup boot sector somewhere. Win98 FAT32 typically does, but the message suggests that you installed DOS on the partition. You can of course use a Win98 DOS 7.x boot disk and just SYS C: again if the rest of Windows is still there... Assuming he still has the disks. Otherwise TestDisk might be a good option. You can install FreeDOS and Windows 98 on the same partition: Yes, but that's complex, and that doesn't sound like what we wants to do. So if this was not the right way, how am I supposed to install freedos on a multipartitioned drive? Can I write over the fd with lilo. My concern is that I have a lot of important data on this DOS computer. If the computer has important data, doing a backup now seems quite important: Yes, backup backup backup. This thread mentions that the computer has 16 MB RAM and the last time I ran SuSE (6.x, maybe 5.x) on such hardware was 10 years ago. The harddisk must be very old unless you replaced it recently... Note that that SuSE version ran Linux 2.2 which did not even support USB yet. Presumably it works well enough for him. Though the way things are these days, you can't run hardly anything without tons of RAM. I think minimum is often i686 PAE and 128 MB RAM, and most don't even bother supporting that. Swapping like mad is not a lot of fun. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user Wow! As usual when I present problems on these mailing lists, the solutions are complex. Nothings easy! I also have a tendency to not explain completely. Usually I'm pretty precise. I am not running any MS Windows on this computer. I am running the DOS 7.10 from Win98 on this computer so I can make use of Fat32, getting more efficiency on a UK MB HD. I primarily use this computer to connect to a DOS network (Little Big Lan) in my office. This computer also has Suse on it. UK which version, but I have been using Ubuntu (on another computer in my office not connected to this lan) since shortly after it was announced. Unfortunately there is email on the suse partitions and I would like (need to?) keep/recover. I have a usb driver for DOS that I use to backup. Usually only selected directories, but this time I'll back up the entire 630 MB. According to a text file from Ranish Partition Manager, this is a 10GB HD with 3 fat32 partitions, a linux swap, and a linux ext2fs partition. I have some pretty detailed in re: partitions, sectors, cylinders, etc. from rRPM reports I saved to disk that might be helpful. I cannot run RPM yet because it requires a DPMI? program. I have found some system files (created by me) that date about 2004, but there is no reference to Linux. I can now run RPM if that helps. John -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi John, As usual when I present problems on these mailing lists, the solutions are complex. Nothings easy! I also have a tendency to not explain completely. Usually I'm pretty precise. I am not running any MS Windows on this computer. I am running the DOS 7.10 from Win98 on this computer so I can make use of Fat32, getting more efficiency on a UK MB HD. I primarily use this computer to connect to a DOS network Well your problem is also complex: You want two DOS versions, FreeDOS and Win98-DOS, on the same computer. Because they use the same style of drive letter numbering, some extra effort is involved in keeping their configuration separate while they both use the same C: drive. I hope the docs for metakern help you regarding this config trickery. Unless of course you simply want to replace Win98 DOS 7.10 by FreeDOS, then you do not have to worry about how to keep Win98 DOS bootable... Unfortunately there is email on the suse partitions and I would like (need to?) keep/recover. I have a usb driver for DOS that I use to backup. Usually only selected directories, but this time I'll back up the entire 630 MB. According to a text file from Ranish Partition Manager, this is a 10GB HD with 3 fat32 partitions, a linux swap, and a linux ext2fs partition. I have some pretty detailed in re: partitions, Good to know and interesting that now DOS has more USB support than the ancient (?) Linux on that computer :-) sectors, cylinders, etc. from rRPM reports I saved to disk that might be helpful. I cannot run RPM yet because it requires a DPMI? program. I have found some system files (created by me) that date about 2004, but there is no reference to Linux. I can now run RPM if that helps. If you need DPMI, you probably need CWSDPMI.EXE somewhere in your PATH directories. Note that this defaults to using swapfiles on C: so you may want to disable that in some cases - see the docs. Regards, Eric -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
On 11/09/2013 10:35 AM, Eric Auer wrote: Hi John, As usual when I present problems on these mailing lists, the solutions are complex. Nothings easy! I also have a tendency to not explain completely. Usually I'm pretty precise. I am not running any MS Windows on this computer. I am running the DOS 7.10 from Win98 on this computer so I can make use of Fat32, getting more efficiency on a UK MB HD. I primarily use this computer to connect to a DOS network Well your problem is also complex: You want two DOS versions, FreeDOS and Win98-DOS, on the same computer. Because they use the same style of drive letter numbering, some extra effort is involved in keeping their configuration separate while they both use the same C: drive. I hope the docs for metakern help you regarding this config trickery. Unless of course you simply want to replace Win98 DOS 7.10 by FreeDOS, then you do not have to worry about how to keep Win98 DOS bootable... to clarify, I ran sys c: from a freedos floppy to write over the win98 OS with freedos. that is how this all started. John -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS/V
On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:36:49 -0500, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Matej Horvat matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si wrote: ... irrelevant comments by me deleted ... PS: I just wrote all that and found this: http://nokonoko365.cocolog-nifty.com/blogfile/freedos/index.html Is that third party software for Japanese support or what? No, according to Chrome's translation, it seems to just be somebody trying FreeDOS + Windows 3.1 under VirtualPC, nothing more. The top of the blog page is indeed about running jp win3.1. Below that it talks about adding Japanese support to FD. The link is broken but a google search turns up working links for fdos0138.exe or fdos0138.lzh. With the drivers being loaded in fdconfig.sys it becomes possible to switch between standard character-mapped text mode (needed for running FD EDIT, etc.) and the VGA mode for running Japanese DOS programs. The readme file with the disk image seems to say that the license is GPL or freeware (I am not good enough to parse Japanese legalese), and includes an email address for the author minashir...@yahoo.co.jp -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS/V
Hi, On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 1:43 PM, TJ Edmister damag...@hyakushiki.net wrote: On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:36:49 -0500, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Matej Horvat matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si wrote: PS: I just wrote all that and found this: http://nokonoko365.cocolog-nifty.com/blogfile/freedos/index.html Is that third party software for Japanese support or what? No, according to Chrome's translation, it seems to just be somebody trying FreeDOS + Windows 3.1 under VirtualPC, nothing more. The top of the blog page is indeed about running jp win3.1. Below that it talks about adding Japanese support to FD. The link is broken but a google search turns up working links for fdos0138.exe or fdos0138.lzh. http://web.archive.org/web/20100520230541/http://homepage1.nifty.com/bible/fdos/freedosvd.html The two main files seem to be (as mentioned) fdos0138.exe (.ZIP sfx of .IMA) and jis4pack.lzh (three .fnt files, the first of which is huge, presumably only useful with something on the .IMA, perhaps FONTNX.EXE ??). With the drivers being loaded in fdconfig.sys it becomes possible to switch between standard character-mapped text mode (needed for running FD EDIT, etc.) and the VGA mode for running Japanese DOS programs. I still don't understand which encoding, which scripts, etc. are supported here. Plus, it's not obvious (to me) which third-party programs are supported or whether such support has to be built into each by default. The readme file with the disk image seems to say that the license is GPL or freeware (I am not good enough to parse Japanese legalese), and includes an email address for the author minashir...@yahoo.co.jp I don't see any sources, but I know that FreeDOS heavily frowns on anything that isn't free/libre (four freedoms). In other words, I don't think freeware, no matter how useful, is good enough to mirror. Presumably the mention here of GPL only refers to FreeDOS proper stuff (kernel, shell), not the others. I really am too pessimistic to email the author. If you or someone else isn't willing, I could try, but I really doubt it would help any of us here very much. And of course I don't speak Japanese, so -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi, On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 12:25 PM, John R. Sowden jsow...@americansentry.net wrote: Wow! As usual when I present problems on these mailing lists, the solutions are complex. Nothings easy! Welcome to computers, where easy means hours of work. I also have a tendency to not explain completely. Usually I'm pretty precise. I am not running any MS Windows on this computer. I am running the DOS 7.10 from Win98 on this computer so I can make use of Fat32, getting more efficiency on a UK MB HD. Okay, yes, admittedly, FAT32 has some advantages, but it's also less supported on some older DOSes and tools. I primarily use this computer to connect to a DOS network (Little Big Lan) in my office. This computer also has Suse on it. UK which version, but I have been using Ubuntu (on another computer in my office not connected to this lan) since shortly after it was announced. Unfortunately there is email on the suse partitions and I would like (need to?) keep/recover. I have a usb driver for DOS that I use to backup. Usually only selected directories, but this time I'll back up the entire 630 MB. You can probably use the DOS (DJGPP) version of TestDisk to read/recover files from an ext2 partition, if that sounds easier than trying to recover your Linux system's booter: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.14.dos.zip According to a text file from Ranish Partition Manager, this is a 10GB HD with 3 fat32 partitions, a linux swap, and a linux ext2fs partition. It also used to be possible (2.4 kernels) to use FAT as host to Linux via UMSDOS or whatever. But the last major distro to do that was Slackware 11 (2006?). Heck, I think 14.1 was just released (and lots has changed). Okay, I'm not really recommending you switch entirely to FAT32, just saying it's possible. (Someone else might even say, Just use DOSEMU under SuSE, but networking under that sounds like a pain, so it wouldn't be any easier, IMO.) I have some pretty detailed in re: partitions, sectors, cylinders, etc. from rRPM reports I saved to disk that might be helpful. I cannot run RPM yet because it requires a DPMI? program. I have found some system files (created by me) that date about 2004, but there is no reference to Linux. I can now run RPM if that helps. Uh ... I dunno. :-) RPM (or RPM5) I thought was a package manager, basically a wrapper around a cpio archive. I'm not aware of any DPMI port of that, and I have no idea what rRPM means (or maybe typo?). You can get various DPMI servers here, but I don't really know how that would help you very much here: http://na.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/djgpp/current/v2misc/csdpmi7b.zip http://www.japheth.de/Download/HX/HXRT216.zip -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] recovering a file?
Hi folks, Interesting problem with my run of xcopy. apparently when I put in this removable drive, the letters get goofy. previously when I checked for example, the removable drive became e shifting what is normally my e drive to f. this time though it became something else without my realizing. so I xcopied the contents of my c drive to my e, which is a problem for one major file. if I want to recover this file as it was before the xcopy process, is there anything I can do? thanks, Karen -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi John, to clarify, I ran sys c: from a freedos floppy to write over the win98 OS with freedos. that is how this all started. Ah, so you do not need Win98-DOS any more? That is easy :-) Actually the question then becomes: Apart from the FreeDOS warning about geometry, which is mostly cosmetic AFAIR, is there anything not working in FreeDOS at the moment? Regards, Eric -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
On 11/09/2013 06:30 PM, Eric Auer wrote: Hi John, to clarify, I ran sys c: from a freedos floppy to write over the win98 OS with freedos. that is how this all started. Ah, so you do not need Win98-DOS any more? That is easy :-) Actually the question then becomes: Apart from the FreeDOS warning about geometry, which is mostly cosmetic AFAIR, is there anything not working in FreeDOS at the moment? Regards, Eric First of all, I did not make myslf clear. I was not running win98. I was only running the dos portion of win98. I wrote over the dos portion of win98 with freedos using the sys command. My concerns are two: 1) In a multi-partitioned environment, how am I supposed to correctly install freedos on a partition without writing over the mbr where grub/lilo/etc resides. 1a) Do I need to install FreeDOS on each fat32 partition? 2) Now I am unable to access my linux partition. This drive has 6 partitions. Three are fat32 dos partitions, one is Linux swap, one is Linux and the last is about 2 gb laying fallow. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] FreeDOS/V
On Sat, 09 Nov 2013 18:22:40 -0500, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: The two main files seem to be (as mentioned) fdos0138.exe (.ZIP sfx of .IMA) and jis4pack.lzh (three .fnt files, the first of which is huge, presumably only useful with something on the .IMA, perhaps FONTNX.EXE ??). Yes, and they are both downloadable here http://dos.minashiro.net/freedosvd.html I still don't understand which encoding, which scripts, etc. are supported here. Plus, it's not obvious (to me) which third-party programs are supported or whether such support has to be built into each by default. I believe the encoding used is Shift-JIS. Instead of the usual character-mapped text mode, the display is switched to a bitmapped mode, the fonts are loaded into memory, and the driver intercepts calls to write text to the screen and handles drawing the characters itself. 7-bit ASCII can be written as normal (half-width characters), but bytes in the 128-255 range can be combined with the following byte to form a longer character code. These can represent any of the kana/kanji/etc. and while they are two bytes long they are also physically twice as wide on the screen (full-width characters). Once the drivers are installed then for instance, one could use the TYPE command to display the included readme file and the Japanese characters would then be displayed properly. Whereas in a normal FreeDOS install, trying to view the file would result in mojibake (nonsense strings). I imagine this would allow running any other legacy DOS programs which were designed to use Shift-JIS. But then, I've never used DOS/V, or any Japanese DOS programs other than the command-line utilities that are included with Japanese Windows XP, so I'm not entirely sure. I also don't know how kanji input (if any) works. I don't see any sources, but I know that FreeDOS heavily frowns on anything that isn't free/libre (four freedoms). In other words, I don't think freeware, no matter how useful, is good enough to mirror. Presumably the mention here of GPL only refers to FreeDOS proper stuff (kernel, shell), not the others. I really am too pessimistic to email the author. If you or someone else isn't willing, I could try, but I really doubt it would help any of us here very much. And of course I don't speak Japanese, so I don't know if it is a good candidate for a mirror, but at least anyone who wants Japanese support in FreeDOS can try it out. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] recovering a file?
Hi Karen, I xcopied the contents of my c drive to my e, which is a problem for one major file. if I want to recover this file as it was before the xcopy process, is there anything I can do? Depends. If you deleted a file, you can try to undelete it. In MS DOS, undelete starts at a deleted file, making it visible again. In FreeDOS, undelete reads out data, copying it to a new location on another drive instead. The idea is that modifications on the drive containing the deleted file might damage other files that you may want to undelete later, so FreeDOS undelete avoids them. Since 2003, thanks to World Wide Rob, FreeDOS undelete also supports MS DOS style, unless you use the /E or advanced options. Unfortunately, as I just find out (years later) that version breaks the dirsave option :-( Is Rob still around for a fix? Assuming you are using the 2002 FreeDOS undelete: e: undelete dirsave \AFFECTEDDIRECTORY c:\dirdata.bak 0 Now assume you have overwritten file example.txt and the dirsave screen output says about that file: EXAMPLE .TXT 20:15:00 09.11.2013 @12345, size 096723 a If you want to know your cluster number, use e.g.: dosfsck -v e: For example your cluster size is 4096 and you have overwritten a file of 1 MB with a file of 96732 byte size. Then you want to recover a 256 cluster file, but the first 24 clusters got overwritten. undelete follow 12345 c:\temp.txt 256 This will skip over the re-used part of your disk and save at most 256 clusters of data from clusters not used at the moment. It will look in the area after your 96723 byte file that overwrote your big file. You can also say 0 instead of 256 to save as many appropriate clusters as undelete can find, but that may be more than you want. Now if you are lucky, c:\temp.txt contains, among other things, parts of your overwritten file. You may want to use a hex editor even if the original file was text if the recovered data contains too much garbage. The more other data you copied after overwriting the file, the more likely it is that clusters of your overwritten file got reused for something else already, in particular if there is relatively little free space on your E: drive: If I understand correctly, you accidentally overwrote a file on the E: drive? And you have enough space on the C: drive to put tempfiles made by undelete? If you use the 2003 or newer version of undelete, you may also be interested what that can do: e: cd \AFFECTEDDIRECTORY undelete this will mention each DELETED file that it can find which looks undelete-able and ask you if you want it undeleted (Yes No Escape). For all yes cases, it will just grow the deleted file from 0 to the original size again and change the name from invisible to visible again where the file still was. Only the first letter of the name is really lost, so it will ask you to type that letter again. For example it can say: ?EADME .TXT (12:34:56, 01.01.2011, size 999) can be undeleted. Undelete (Y/N/Esc)? then you type Y, then it asks: Enter first character of name: then you type R, then it confirms and makes the file visible again as README.TXT with size 999 bytes as originally. If you have accidentally deleted files and if their disk clusters did not already get used by something else again, this is obviously a more user friendly way of getting your content back compared to the 2002 version. However, if you have overwritten a big file with a smaller file of the same name by accident, the 2002 version can give you more technical, low-level help. I think you can find both versions here: http://ericauer.cosmodata.virtuaserver.com.br/soft/ undelete-2002nov09.zip undelete-2004jan19.zip undelete32beta.zip (dated 2008-02-20, for FAT32?) It would be cool if somebody could volunteer to undust the code and make a version where all three aspects work at the same time: FAT32, technical 2002 style usage and friendly 2003/2004 style one. Thanks in advance to whoever might volunteer! Karen: If you have further questions, let me know. Regards, Eric -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] recovering a file?
let me simplify this some. I just did this about three hours ago. I have done nothing to the drive where the file was, in an effort of being very very sure it can be recovered. granted dos 7.1 does not have undilute. dos 6.22 did, and I still have that on a different drive. I am not running freedos, and the broken factor you mention has me wondering if using that utility is best regardless. additionally I have the entire set of norton utilities for dos v 8.0, the last full edition. I have really slept since running ms dos undilute. anyone have a copy of this? its only one file around 125k in size, but it is profoundly important. Karen On Sun, 10 Nov 2013, Eric Auer wrote: Hi Karen, I xcopied the contents of my c drive to my e, which is a problem for one major file. if I want to recover this file as it was before the xcopy process, is there anything I can do? Depends. If you deleted a file, you can try to undelete it. In MS DOS, undelete starts at a deleted file, making it visible again. In FreeDOS, undelete reads out data, copying it to a new location on another drive instead. The idea is that modifications on the drive containing the deleted file might damage other files that you may want to undelete later, so FreeDOS undelete avoids them. Since 2003, thanks to World Wide Rob, FreeDOS undelete also supports MS DOS style, unless you use the /E or advanced options. Unfortunately, as I just find out (years later) that version breaks the dirsave option :-( Is Rob still around for a fix? Assuming you are using the 2002 FreeDOS undelete: e: undelete dirsave \AFFECTEDDIRECTORY c:\dirdata.bak 0 Now assume you have overwritten file example.txt and the dirsave screen output says about that file: EXAMPLE .TXT 20:15:00 09.11.2013 @12345, size 096723 a If you want to know your cluster number, use e.g.: dosfsck -v e: For example your cluster size is 4096 and you have overwritten a file of 1 MB with a file of 96732 byte size. Then you want to recover a 256 cluster file, but the first 24 clusters got overwritten. undelete follow 12345 c:\temp.txt 256 This will skip over the re-used part of your disk and save at most 256 clusters of data from clusters not used at the moment. It will look in the area after your 96723 byte file that overwrote your big file. You can also say 0 instead of 256 to save as many appropriate clusters as undelete can find, but that may be more than you want. Now if you are lucky, c:\temp.txt contains, among other things, parts of your overwritten file. You may want to use a hex editor even if the original file was text if the recovered data contains too much garbage. The more other data you copied after overwriting the file, the more likely it is that clusters of your overwritten file got reused for something else already, in particular if there is relatively little free space on your E: drive: If I understand correctly, you accidentally overwrote a file on the E: drive? And you have enough space on the C: drive to put tempfiles made by undelete? If you use the 2003 or newer version of undelete, you may also be interested what that can do: e: cd \AFFECTEDDIRECTORY undelete this will mention each DELETED file that it can find which looks undelete-able and ask you if you want it undeleted (Yes No Escape). For all yes cases, it will just grow the deleted file from 0 to the original size again and change the name from invisible to visible again where the file still was. Only the first letter of the name is really lost, so it will ask you to type that letter again. For example it can say: ?EADME .TXT (12:34:56, 01.01.2011, size 999) can be undeleted. Undelete (Y/N/Esc)? then you type Y, then it asks: Enter first character of name: then you type R, then it confirms and makes the file visible again as README.TXT with size 999 bytes as originally. If you have accidentally deleted files and if their disk clusters did not already get used by something else again, this is obviously a more user friendly way of getting your content back compared to the 2002 version. However, if you have overwritten a big file with a smaller file of the same name by accident, the 2002 version can give you more technical, low-level help. I think you can find both versions here: http://ericauer.cosmodata.virtuaserver.com.br/soft/ undelete-2002nov09.zip undelete-2004jan19.zip undelete32beta.zip (dated 2008-02-20, for FAT32?) It would be cool if somebody could volunteer to undust the code and make a version where all three aspects work at the same time: FAT32, technical 2002 style usage and friendly 2003/2004 style one. Thanks in advance to whoever might volunteer! Karen: If you have further questions, let me know. Regards, Eric -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application
Re: [Freedos-user] Warningsafter installing FD on a partitioned Drive
Hi again, given that I have very little information about your problem and situation, I just give you a very big pile of ideas - maybe there is something useful in it, or maybe something to ponder further. First of all, I did not make myslf clear. I was not running win98. I was only running the dos portion of win98. I wrote over the dos portion of win98 with freedos using the sys command. My concerns are two: 1) In a multi-partitioned environment, how am I supposed to correctly install freedos on a partition without writing over the mbr where grub/lilo/etc resides. The SYS command does not overwrite the MBR. So DOS only boots when you select to boot from the DOS partititon in your GRUB / LILO menu. I am assuming that your boot menu does not need a copy of the DOS boot sector as a file. Instead, I assume that your coresponding menu item is defined as (chain-)boot the boot sector of that partition. If your menu does support boot sector files, that obviously gives the interesting opportunity to have MS DOS and FreeDOS in separate menu items while both DOS versions still share the C: drive, but you already said that you do not need that. What happens if you select Linux in your boot menu now? You wrote that there was a problem for you to boot Linux at the moment. Or is the boot menu itself not there? If so, how did booting Linux work BEFORE you installed FreeDOS? Maybe you had a boot menu in MS DOS, not in the MBR? Note that you can use menus like metakern and grub4dos that can be installed on a DOS partititon: Metakern for example has the option to boot your Linux partition. It is possible that there is a LILO or GRUB *there* which then loads Linux. If you install grub4dos, you can even define menu items to boot specific Linux kernel files, but I myself have no experience with grub4dos... Also note that no matter if you have your Linux boot menu in the MBR or at another location, the MBR also contains a boot flag telling which partition is booted by default. It might be that one setting brings you to a boot menu installed in a partition while another just directly boots the operating system installed in another partition. I am not sure which situation you get with the boot menu installed in the MBR, but most boot menu systems have a tool to reinstall the boot menu itself without touching the partitioning. While it was once popular to have boot menus in the MBR, I would now prefer having them installed in the partition of the operating system to which they belong (only if they do support doing that in a safe way without breaking contents of that partition, of course!) to avoid having to fight over which operating system gets to put their menu stuff in the MBR. Linux against Windows / MS DOS, for example... According to wikipedia, GRUB 1 is installed in the MBR and a few kilobytes following, while GRUB 2 is installed in the MBR and optionally in the boot sector of a Linux partition of your choice and in a few kilobytes after the MBR. That gives you a second possibility to boot GRUB 2 even if the MBR itself is in use by something else... For EFI systems, a small boot partition is used, not few kilobytes ... but EFI only applies to computers much newer than yours. LILO can be installed in the MBR or the boot sector of a Linux partition, too, plus either a few kilobytes after the MBR or some sectors at some other place (the place info can be updated by some tool). The LOADLIN boot menu, finally, is a DOS program which lets you boot Linux kernels from DOS, but you have to copy the kernel to a DOS-reachable place. SYSLINUX is vaguely similar to LOADLIN. As you see, there are many ways to boot Linux, e.g. PLoP, Smart Boot Manager, NTLDR, XOSL, GAG, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_boot_loaders 1a) Do I need to install FreeDOS on each fat32 partition? As with MS DOS 7.10, you only have to install FreeDOS on C: to boot from it. You can then use the other partitions as other drive letters. Simply the same as with Microsoft :-) 2) Now I am unable to access my linux partition. This drive has 6 partitions. Three are fat32 dos partitions, one is Linux swap, one is Linux and the last is about 2 gb laying fallow. Because SYS does not change the MBR, I wonder which other step damaged your boot menu. I hope you have not changed partitions with FDISK? If only your GRUB or LILO are damaged, you could boot Linux from a CD, DVD, USB, network or similar and simply install GRUB or LILO again. I think SuSE even had some boot CD menu option for repairing installed Linux / make it boot again. I think your problem can be solved in two directions: If you are experienced with the low-level side of Linux, you probably can solve it yourself more easily than explaining all details now. On the other hand, you may want to explain what exactly is the current situation and what exactly caused it and what exactly was the original situation, possibly interactively on IRC or Skype or
Re: [Freedos-user] recovering a file?
Hi Karen, let me simplify this some. I just did this about three hours ago. I have done nothing to the drive where the file was, in an effort of being very very sure it can be recovered. As mentioned, the 2002 version of FreeDOS undelete avoids to write the drive FROM which you extract data, but newer versions may. The (Norton) version shipped with MS DOS also does. If you want to be very very sure, then the best way would be to make a disk image of the drive which contains the damaged file and then do all other steps in a read-only fashion only using that disk image. Forensics tutorials should be available online - for example people tend to accidentally overwrite pictures on their digicam memory cards, so the problem is sort of common. granted dos 7.1 does not have undilute. dos 6.22 did, and I still have that on a different drive. Note that the undelete of MS DOS 6 does not support FAT32, so if your partition is FAT32, it would be a different story. FreeDOS also has only experimental support in a newer undelete version. additionally I have the entire set of norton utilities for dos v 8.0, the last full edition. I am not familiar with that, but Wikipedia says that only from Norton Utilities for Win 95 version 2 on, FAT32 is supported. In general, I think Norton Utilities for DOS version 8 are more powerful and professional than the undelete included in MS DOS. I have really slept since running ms dos undilute. anyone have a copy of this? its only one file around 125k in size, but it is profoundly important. Please explain in more detail: Which partition type is the partition where the damaged file resides? Is it is the root directory or in a subdirectory? Do I understand correctly that it did not get deleted, but rather overwritten? If so, how big is the file by which it got overwritten? Were there other copies of the file at other locations at some time? Maybe undeleting a deleted copy of the file works better than recovering only the end of the file, now that you may have overwritten the start of the main copy by accident. If there were different copies at different places, some of which are now deleted, undeleting them can help you to recover different parts of your file. As with all delicate repair work, the best way would be using a disk image in read-only mode to avoid degrading available data further. I think that the default way of overwriting a file is to re-use the same disk area, so if you overwrote X.TXT of 125kb with another X.TXT of 5kb, you probably can recover only the 120kb at the end. In addition, if you have 4kb cluster size, you can at most recover 117kb directly, as the first 2 clusters got partially overwritten. It may help to additionally extract the new small file to a new place, with size extended to 8kb, though: It should have the missing 3kb appended... Of course working on a disk image can be a pain: Often, you do not have enough space for a raw copy of the whole partition (whole disk should not be necessary) and you may not have the tools either. Comercially, people often used Ghost for this. However, that got discontinued now. Experienced Linux users might just use the dd command, risking a copy in the wrong direction when making a typo. Both Ghost and Linux partimage have had no update for 3 years now. PING and Redo Backup and Recovery also are not very up to date. Clonezilla and Mondo Rescue seem to be the most promising options at the moment. For G4L (Ghost for Linux) English Wikipedia has no description, but German Wikipedia does... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonezilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_Rescue If you feel insecure about the process, you may want to ask somebody with disk imaging experience to make the image for you. If the partition is small, they can burn a copy of the image file on DVD which then is implicitly read-only. Otherwise, you may want to make more than one copy if you are worried about the read-only part of your repair attempts. If you cannot find sufficient disk space for a disk image, you may want to get or borrow an extra drive, depending on how optimistic you are about the repair in general. Of course you can also always limit yourself to some preferrably read-only analysis and rescue attempts on the original disk, in particular if you only want to try a limited number of things and then move on. Regards, Eric PS: Given that you have the complete Norton Utilities for DOS, you can use their disk editor (in read-only mode, as viewer, preferrably) to investigate the area of your damaged file to ponder further repair steps. PPS: The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Utilities page says MS DOS 5 UNDELETE is from the Norton Utilities version 6 and MS DOS 6 DEFRAG is from Norton version 7. Also, MS may have licensed modified / smaller versions.
