Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Exilas]

Hi everybody, thank you all for your contributions.

@Karen: Eric is right, my original issue with FreeDOS floppy drive 
letter has been solved by executing the boot from CD in "harddisk image" 
easter egg mode. Also, later on I managed to install FreeDOS on a HD 
partition, and also booting from there grants correct access to floppy 
drive via the A: letter.


Actually, now I've no more issues with FreeDOS, so this thread should be 
closed as being now widely off topic here.


Since you all were so kind to chime in with useful tidbits, though, I'm 
going to provide some feedback here; then, if you are still interested 
in this issue, I suggest to move to the following ongoing thread on 
wcfed: 
https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/1221236-can-t-read-superblock-error-with-5-25-360k-floppy-drives


@Travis: my BIOS supports just one floppy drive (likely for the reason 
geneb explained), that's why I detached the original 3.5 to make room 
for the 5.25 one. The drive cable has two connectors and the twist 
between them; I tried several combinations of jumpers and connectors and 
found that the end connector is the right one to attach the 5.25 drive to.


I'm using a 5.25/360K drive because it's the only one at hand; however, 
I feel that I'll need to find a 5.25/1.2M drive, to overcome both the 
BIOS missing the 5.25/360K option, and the likely hardware issue due to 
the FDC not being able activate the drive (see 
https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/40967-panasonic-ju455-fdd?p=499283#post499283)


@Eric: the above should explain why I only got SOME reactions from the 
drive. If this hardware issue is confirmed, I feel there's nothing I can 
do on settings/config that could work around it. I'm neither capable nor 
inclined to tamper with the drive at the hardware level. I will give 
VGACOPY another go, though.


Again thanks for your help!



Il 20/08/2021 22:58, Travis Siegel ha scritto:
Hmm, I was not aware of that, thanks for the info.  Always good to 
know possible causes of failure.  Now there's one more to add to the 
pile.


On 8/20/2021 3:05 PM, geneb wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2021, Travis Siegel wrote:


There are multiple issues here.

First, if you want to use both floppy drives, your floppy cable must 
have both connections on it, since there is rarely more than a 
single floppy controller slot on a motherboard.




A quick note on this - if the motherboard is after a certain era, a 
two drive cable won't help.  As a cost reduction measure, chipset 
manufacturers dropped the 2nd drive select pin off of the 
controller.  The BIOS configuration screen should reflect this by 
only showing configuration information for a single floppy drive.


apologies for the noise if this doesn't apply. :)

g.





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[Freedos-user] Minor but nice update to PGME

[Jerome Shidel]

Hi All, 

Just released minor (but nice) update to PGME. Fixed a non-critical (visual 
only) bug. Tweaked a couple fonts. And if you use the TIME screen saver, it 
will now "remember" what scale it was last left it. You could change scale 
before. But, it would always reset. You can download the update at  
https://up.lod.bz/PGME  or if you prefer to use a 
FreeDOS package manager https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/pgme.html 
 , or from SourceForge, or 
from the Ibiblio repo.

:-)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Travis Siegel]

Hmm, I was not aware of that, thanks for the info.  Always good to know 
possible causes of failure.  Now there's one more to add to the pile.


On 8/20/2021 3:05 PM, geneb wrote:

On Fri, 20 Aug 2021, Travis Siegel wrote:


There are multiple issues here.

First, if you want to use both floppy drives, your floppy cable must 
have both connections on it, since there is rarely more than a single 
floppy controller slot on a motherboard.




A quick note on this - if the motherboard is after a certain era, a 
two drive cable won't help.  As a cost reduction measure, chipset 
manufacturers dropped the 2nd drive select pin off of the controller.  
The BIOS configuration screen should reflect this by only showing 
configuration information for a single floppy drive.


apologies for the noise if this doesn't apply. :)

g.





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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD (fwd)

[Karen Lewellen]

Eric,
posting this reply on list, since I am sure writing me privately without 
permission  was a mistake on your part.

Karen




-- Forwarded message --
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2021 21:45:35 +0200
From: Eric Auer 
To: Karen Lewellen 
Subject: Re: Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD


Hi Karen,

as far as I understand, the physical drive is a 360k drive,
while the BIOS only supports 1.2M and newer drives. Also,
the harddisk already has Linux and Windows. The challenge
is to boot DOS from a separate boot medium and get it to
access the 360k drive. Exilas managed to boot from CD in
"harddisk image" easter egg mode to access A: at all, but
the mismatch in drive type still blocked further progress,
as far as I understood. But I think we can wait until Exilas
replies to your mail on the list: I may have misunderstood
the physical setup.

Regards, Eric


Hi Eric, everyone.
I admit to having a challenge picturing the problem.
If this  5.25 drive is physically  installed, it should? be shoring up
in your BIOS letting you at least perhaps  impact how it is designated.
Otherwise,I do agree with Eric, regardless of your boot location and
sequence, the drive should just move up a letter, if not automatically
either  a or b..which may be where I am stuck.
At the most  basic level, what is the drive letter for the 5.25 drive now?
Karen


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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Eric Auer]

Hi Liam and Exilas,

> Use the DRIVPARM command in CONFIG.SYS to inform the OS of the real
> drive type and parameters?

Both DRIVPARM and DRIVER are related to situations where the BIOS
e.g. fails to report correct (typically floppy) drive properties.

At this used to be only relevant for really ancient hardware,
FreeDOS does not yet support either of the two. In situations
where you add drives by adding driveRs, you need neither, so
for example USB drives and CD/DVD drives are not affected by
this missing feature of FreeDOS :-)

Of course Exilas may seem to be in a situation where the drive
and the BIOS mismatch, as Exilas' drive is a physical 360k one
without ability to use 1.2M disks, while the BIOS does not know
anything older than 1.2M drives, so some messing with internal
BIOS or DOS settings might be in order, exception proving the
rule ;-) I would not go as far as suggesting to use a DOS with
DRIVPARM or DRIVER either, though. Those have not received any
useful updates in the last 30 years and may not help much now.

I think Exilas has gotten SOME reactions from the drive, so the
TESTCFG output that no controller, interrupt or drive exists is
more likely related to a boot setting conflict than to not being
able to use the drive at all?

Note that you can sometimes tell the BIOS to seek the floppy
head at boot, which may result in failing to find an 80 track
drive (because 360k drives have only 40 tracks) which could
give the BIOS the impression that no drive exists at all, in
context of the BIOS being unaware that drive variants with
less than 80 tracks exist at all. So I suggest to configure
the BIOS to not do the seek test. Then it can stick to the
belief of having an 1.2M drive until you can load something
in DOS which knows better than that. Maybe VGACOPY can be
told that the drive is a 360k one in spite of the BIOS or
CMOS data falsely saying otherwise?

Low level ideas for changing the drive type: The CMOS data,
address 10h, would be 20h for "A: 1.2 MB, B: not installed",
you could change it to 10h for "A: 360k, B: not installed"
and hope the BIOS does not realize knowing nothing about
360k drives either way. Not sure which tools would be easy
to use for CMOS edits (you also have to fix checksums etc.)
but maybe somebody here can recommend some.

The FreeDOS kernel and some disk apps will probably use int
13h, function 8 to get drive info. Among other things, this
will return the 2 (1.2M) or 1 (360k) from the CMOS, as well
as the geometry (40 or 80 tracks, 1, 2 or more heads etc.)
which in theory gives you the chance to modify values. But
in practice, you would have to do that before booting DOS.

After booting DOS, you can use int 13h, function 17h to pick
"360k in 360k", "360k in 1.2M", "1.2M in 1.2M" or "720k in
720k or 1.44M" drive modes, which gives you the chance to
finally push the BIOS to accept the drive being 360k, not
just the disk. DOS itself also tracks some drive properties.

However, almost everything will use the BIOS to access the
floppy and given that the BIOS does not list 360k drives as
something it knows to exist, support could be very limited
even if you try to help it by tuning some status variables.

Which is why VGACOPY, with suitable overrides in the config
of VGACOPY, might be something which can help you more! :-)

Note that controllers which support 2.88M drives probably
do not support 360k floppy drives, but I fail to see what
makes those special, so maybe it is only SOFTWARE which
needs to know whether you have 40 or 80 hardware tracks,
so it can skip every other track for 360k disks in 1.2M
drives. Software is easier to work around.

The easiest solution would probably be that you get an 1.2M
drive given that your mainboard supports those natively :-)

Or of course one of the more widespread 1.44M drives. Various
tasks can also be solved using virtual floppy drives, which
only exist in software. Some retrocomputing people also use
microcontroller devices which have a SD card socket and some
floppy or IDE connector, simulating drives of your choice,
but I think there are few situations where those are nice?
Other people here can probably recommend some products :-)

Regards, Eric

PS: See RBIL port info for ports 3F0 to 3F7 for those who
enjoy reading about the low level floppy controller magic.



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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Karen Lewellen]

Hi Eric, everyone.
I admit to having a challenge picturing the problem.
If this  5.25 drive is physically  installed, it should? be shoring up in 
your BIOS letting you at least perhaps  impact how it is designated. 
Otherwise,I do agree with Eric, regardless of your boot location and 
sequence, the drive should just move up a letter, if not automatically 
either  a or b..which may be where I am stuck.

At the most  basic level, what is the drive letter for the 5.25 drive now?
Karen
t


On Fri, 20 Aug 2021, Eric Auer wrote:



Hi!

In theory, when you boot from a CD containing a virtual boot
floppy image, the BIOS is supposed to move your real floppy
drive to the next drive letter, so it should be B: When you
use a MEMDISK bootable ramdisk, I expect similar effects.

In case of the BIOS method, we could add a tool which leaves
boot image mode and returns drive letters to normal, but of
course this will have side effects by "taking out" the boot
floppy (image) while you might still need files from it.

If it is a problem for you that the real floppy moves to B:,
you could also work with DOS commands to reassign letters,
but I suspect similar problems as with leaving boot image
mode, so I would recommend to stick to B: for real floppy
until you can boot FreeDOS from an actual fixed drive or
from an actual floppy.

Another method would be to use a bootable harddisk image on
the boot CD, so the real fixed disk gets moved to D: etc. and
the real floppy stays at A: all the time. Which boot images
use which style of boot image depends on which of our images
you use (we also have USB thumb drive boot images) and which
boot menu option you select :-)

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[geneb]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2021, Travis Siegel wrote:


There are multiple issues here.

First, if you want to use both floppy drives, your floppy cable must 
have both connections on it, since there is rarely more than a single 
floppy controller slot on a motherboard.




A quick note on this - if the motherboard is after a certain era, a 
two drive cable won't help.  As a cost reduction measure, chipset 
manufacturers dropped the 2nd drive select pin off of the controller.  The 
BIOS configuration screen should reflect this by only showing 
configuration information for a single floppy drive.


apologies for the noise if this doesn't apply. :)

g.


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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Travis Siegel]

There are multiple issues here.

First, if you want to use both floppy drives, your floppy cable must 
have both connections on it, since there is rarely more than a single 
floppy controller slot on a motherboard.


Second, there needs to be 5 (if I remember correctly) pins reversed 
between drive A: and drive B:.  Most floppy cables already have this 
reversal.


Next, if you're using 5.25 floppies, you must remember that the 1.2MB 
drives have smaller read heads than the 360KB drives, this means that a 
1.2 drive will have no trouble reading a 360 disk, since the tracks are 
wider, and the smaller heads are (usually) in the middle of the 360KB track.


However, the 1.2MB tracks are smaller, and any kind of misalignment 
means your 1.2MB floppy drive may not read the disks, because of this 
factor.


I had many many 1.2MB disks not work in one machine, but work fine in 
another one, while all 360KB disks worked no matter the drive.



Plus, as you may or may not already know, sometimes, hardware will 
determine which drive letter a drive tries to be.  Most of the floppy 
drives had physical jumpers you needed to set to determine their drive 
letter, though depending on how old your drive is, (or newer depending 
on how you look at it), there may not be jumpers, and the cable 
determines which drive is which.


You shouldn't need to disconnect either of the drives, the one at the 
end of the cable will usually be A:, while the one in the middle will 
usually be B:.  That is of course subject to cmos settings, jumpers, and 
cables, but generally things just work when everything is configured 
properly, and/or if the drives don't have jumpers.


This same sort of thing goes for MFM HDS too, only those have separate 
control 20-pin cables that must be present as well.


Sometimes, I have to wonder why there's less room inside modern pcs, 
even though there's fewer cables.





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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Jerome Shidel]

Hello,

> On Aug 20, 2021, at 8:19 AM, Exilas  wrote:
> 
> Hi Eric,
> thank you very much for your help, really appreciated!
> 
> First of all, my drive letter issue has been solved... more or less.
> 
> In my first attempt, I picked the "Install to HD" menu item to see the 
> available options, then chose to "Return to DOS". This way, I got A: as the 
> main/current drive letter, which refers to the "FD13-CDBI" volume. This was 
> the reason for my original post, since I believed this was the "standard" 
> behavior.

This boot method uses SYSLINUX/MEMDISK to boot an emulated floppy image to 
simply install FreeDOS to the hard disk.

> Then, I rebooted the LiveCD and out of curiosity I picked the last menu item 
> "FreeDOS is a trademark...": to my surprise, the system did boot, asking me 
> if I wanted to install to HD. Upon my "no", FreeDOS came up with C: as the 
> main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-HDX86"), assigning A: to the physical 
> floppy drive!

This was shown in the FreeDOS 1.3-RC4 Easter Egg video. 
https://youtu.be/SB17eypovvY 
It uses a similar process. However, it boots a small emulated hard disk image. 
This leaves the Floppies alone. It also requires no DOS level CD/DVD support.

> Then I booted once again, this time picking the first menu item "Use FreeDOS 
> 1.3 in live Environment mode", and the system loaded a LOT of packages it 
> didn't bother to earlier, ending with R: as the main/current drive letter 
> (volume "FD13-RAMDRV"), and with A: assigned to a new volume "FD13-HYDRA”.

This method boots  a different Floppy Image and starts the process to bring the 
LiveCD Environment up. And when possible, initializes a RAM drive as drive R: 
and also if possible, transfers control and the DOS over to that drive and runs 
the OS from there. 

> So, it seems that FreeDOS has (at least) three different behaviors about how 
> to assign drive letters, one of which is fortunately suiting my needs. Albeit 
> a bit confusing for my newbie skills, at least I can work from there now :)

The USB images boot using the BIOS to support them directly as a Hard Drive. 
Also, The Legacy CD does not use MEMDISK/SYSLINUX in favor of BIOS El Torito 
Support. 

So, basically there are 5 boot schemes. This of course does not count the CD 
Boot Floppy or the Floppy Edition Release. But, those are just boot directly 
from real floppy disk drives.

:-)

Jerome


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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 at 19:02, Exilas  wrote:
>
> In the hope someone could still provide me with additional hints, I'm
> posting here all the information I've found about the involved hardware.

Use the DRIVPARM command in CONFIG.SYS to inform the OS of the real
drive type and parameters?

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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Exilas]

Ok so I tried with FreeDOS booting from the LiveCD. In this way, I can 
address the physical 5.25 drive on letter A:, but I always get a "Seek 
error" when trying to access to a disk by executing the command "dir 
a:". This seems very similar to the "Can't read superblock" error I get 
from Linux.


Then I tried with the TESTCFG program, with no better luck: if I run 
TESTCFG A:, I get a "BIOS reports no drive" error. If I try to force the 
drive type with TESTCFT A: 360, I get a "No FDC interrupt!" error. 
ImageDisk itself does not go any better.


I've googled for the "No FDC interrupt!" error, but I found little and 
nothing useful, at least in my eyes. Upon some oblique hints, I also 
tried to play with the drive jumpers, but I got nowhere nearer to my goal.


At this point I'm basically stuck and unable to read those disks with 
the available hardware. There are just too many combinations to pursue a 
brute force approach, and I've no technical knowledge to prune the tree 
of the "obsiously" silly attempts.


In the hope someone could still provide me with additional hints, I'm 
posting here all the information I've found about the involved hardware.


Floppy Disk Controller: NEC 765
Floppy Disk Drive: Panasonic/Matsushita JU-455-5 (360KB)

VGACOPY reports the first (and unique) drive to be on $3F0, as I assume 
it is expected.


Jumpers of the drive are set as the manufacturer default, except for the 
RY (PC XT-AT compatibility), which is set to ON, and  TM (terminator) 
which is set to OFF; documentation is here 
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/panasonic/floppy/Panasonic_5.25-jumpers.pdf 
and also here


It is worth noting that:
- I'm not sure the drive does work (even if they react to issued commands)
- I'm not sure the disks do work (but I have no other surely working 
drive to test them)
- I removed the drive from a _venerable_ Olivetti M19 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M19), gave them a cleanup and 
mounted them (one at a time, of course, and changing the jumpers on the 
original secondary one). I had also to pick the original drive cable, 
since the connector on the motherboard is the same, but those drives 
have a flat connector (visible here, top 
left:https://i.postimg.cc/bNFhH1ST/PANASONIC-B.jpg); so it is possible 
that the cable is broken or simply not compatible with the controller.
- I've found a long thread about an issue that seems very similar to 
mine; from the thread summary 
(https://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum/technical-support/vintage-computer-hardware/40967-panasonic-ju455-fdd?p=499710#post499710) 
it seems like a change in the hardware is in order, which is beyond my 
limits.


Any further help is appreciated.



Il 20/08/2021 14:19, Exilas ha scritto:

Hi Eric,
thank you very much for your help, really appreciated!

First of all, my drive letter issue has been solved... more or less.

In my first attempt, I picked the "Install to HD" menu item to see the 
available options, then chose to "Return to DOS". This way, I got A: 
as the main/current drive letter, which refers to the "FD13-CDBI" 
volume. This was the reason for my original post, since I believed 
this was the "standard" behavior.


Then, I rebooted the LiveCD and out of curiosity I picked the last 
menu item "FreeDOS is a trademark...": to my surprise, the system did 
boot, asking me if I wanted to install to HD. Upon my "no", FreeDOS 
came up with C: as the main/current drive letter (volume 
"FD13-HDX86"), assigning A: to the physical floppy drive!


Then I booted once again, this time picking the first menu item "Use 
FreeDOS 1.3 in live Environment mode", and the system loaded a LOT of 
packages it didn't bother to earlier, ending with R: as the 
main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-RAMDRV"), and with A: assigned 
to a new volume "FD13-HYDRA".


So, it seems that FreeDOS has (at least) three different behaviors 
about how to assign drive letters, one of which is fortunately suiting 
my needs. Albeit a bit confusing for my newbie skills, at least I can 
work from there now :)


Answering your questions.

My BIOS does support a single floppy drive, so I detached the original 
3.5/1.44M drive and replaced it with the 5.25/360K. So there is just 
one floppy drive in the system. Supported drives are 5.25/1.2M, 
3.5/720K, 3.5/1.44M, 3.5/2.88M.


The tool I've been suggested to use is Dave Dunfield’s ImageDisk 
(http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/), since it does not relies on 
BIOS settings; so, assuming the issue comes from the BIOS, it could 
allow me to read those disks.


Of course, it is at all possible that all those disks are gone for 
good, since they are 25 years old or so; indeed, I did manage to 
access the floppy drive from both Linux and FreeDOS (after my second 
boot, as above) and I always get "Can't read superblock" (Linux) or 
"Seek error" (FreeDOS) on the 5-6 disks I tried to read. BTW, it seems 
widely known that WinXP does not support 5.25/360K drives at all.


Now, I just have to find a 

Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Exilas]

Hi Eric,
thank you very much for your help, really appreciated!

First of all, my drive letter issue has been solved... more or less.

In my first attempt, I picked the "Install to HD" menu item to see the 
available options, then chose to "Return to DOS". This way, I got A: as 
the main/current drive letter, which refers to the "FD13-CDBI" volume. 
This was the reason for my original post, since I believed this was the 
"standard" behavior.


Then, I rebooted the LiveCD and out of curiosity I picked the last menu 
item "FreeDOS is a trademark...": to my surprise, the system did boot, 
asking me if I wanted to install to HD. Upon my "no", FreeDOS came up 
with C: as the main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-HDX86"), 
assigning A: to the physical floppy drive!


Then I booted once again, this time picking the first menu item "Use 
FreeDOS 1.3 in live Environment mode", and the system loaded a LOT of 
packages it didn't bother to earlier, ending with R: as the main/current 
drive letter (volume "FD13-RAMDRV"), and with A: assigned to a new 
volume "FD13-HYDRA".


So, it seems that FreeDOS has (at least) three different behaviors about 
how to assign drive letters, one of which is fortunately suiting my 
needs. Albeit a bit confusing for my newbie skills, at least I can work 
from there now :)


Answering your questions.

My BIOS does support a single floppy drive, so I detached the original 
3.5/1.44M drive and replaced it with the 5.25/360K. So there is just one 
floppy drive in the system. Supported drives are 5.25/1.2M, 3.5/720K, 
3.5/1.44M, 3.5/2.88M.


The tool I've been suggested to use is Dave Dunfield’s ImageDisk 
(http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/), since it does not relies on BIOS 
settings; so, assuming the issue comes from the BIOS, it could allow me 
to read those disks.


Of course, it is at all possible that all those disks are gone for good, 
since they are 25 years old or so; indeed, I did manage to access the 
floppy drive from both Linux and FreeDOS (after my second boot, as 
above) and I always get "Can't read superblock" (Linux) or "Seek error" 
(FreeDOS) on the 5-6 disks I tried to read. BTW, it seems widely known 
that WinXP does not support 5.25/360K drives at all.


Now, I just have to find a way to bring the ImageDisk tool into 
FreeDOS... not so trivial when working from a CD with no access to 
floppy disks, USB drives, network and hard disks.


Oh well, I'll come up with something! :)

Thanks again!
Marco


Il 20/08/2021 13:29, Eric Auer ha scritto:

PS: I suspect that your computer with 5.25 drive also has
a 3.5 drive, so the 5.25 may be B: and gets moved to "C:"
while C: cannot be a floppy in FreeDOS? In that case, you
could try to change jumpers, wiring and BIOS settings to
make the 5.25 drive A: so it gets moved to B: when you
boot from FreeDOS CD?

However, as you say your BIOS does not support the drive
at all, you can expect some problems anyway. Which tools
do you plan to use to access 5.25 disks and which types
of drives and disks does the BIOS support well? Does it
support having 2 floppy drives or only one? I remember a
case where only the BIOS failed to support two, while the
hardware did support two, but it could also happen that
the controller only supports one.

Can you access the 5.25 with Linux or XP, by the way?

Feel free to reply on the list in the original thread.
Regards, Eric





Il 20/08/2021 13:24, Eric Auer ha scritto:

Hi!

In theory, when you boot from a CD containing a virtual boot
floppy image, the BIOS is supposed to move your real floppy
drive to the next drive letter, so it should be B: When you
use a MEMDISK bootable ramdisk, I expect similar effects.

In case of the BIOS method, we could add a tool which leaves
boot image mode and returns drive letters to normal, but of
course this will have side effects by "taking out" the boot
floppy (image) while you might still need files from it.

If it is a problem for you that the real floppy moves to B:,
you could also work with DOS commands to reassign letters,
but I suspect similar problems as with leaving boot image
mode, so I would recommend to stick to B: for real floppy
until you can boot FreeDOS from an actual fixed drive or
from an actual floppy.

Another method would be to use a bootable harddisk image on
the boot CD, so the real fixed disk gets moved to D: etc. and
the real floppy stays at A: all the time. Which boot images
use which style of boot image depends on which of our images
you use (we also have USB thumb drive boot images) and which
boot menu option you select :-)

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Eric Auer]

Hi!

In theory, when you boot from a CD containing a virtual boot
floppy image, the BIOS is supposed to move your real floppy
drive to the next drive letter, so it should be B: When you
use a MEMDISK bootable ramdisk, I expect similar effects.

In case of the BIOS method, we could add a tool which leaves
boot image mode and returns drive letters to normal, but of
course this will have side effects by "taking out" the boot
floppy (image) while you might still need files from it.

If it is a problem for you that the real floppy moves to B:,
you could also work with DOS commands to reassign letters,
but I suspect similar problems as with leaving boot image
mode, so I would recommend to stick to B: for real floppy
until you can boot FreeDOS from an actual fixed drive or
from an actual floppy.

Another method would be to use a bootable harddisk image on
the boot CD, so the real fixed disk gets moved to D: etc. and
the real floppy stays at A: all the time. Which boot images
use which style of boot image depends on which of our images
you use (we also have USB thumb drive boot images) and which
boot menu option you select :-)

Regards, Eric



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[Freedos-user] Accessing real floppy drive after booting the LiveCD

[Exilas]

Hi all,
sorry for the likely trivial question from a FreeDOS newbie.

I'm trying to access a physical 5.25/360KB floppy drive connected to an 
old PC whose BIOS does not support that kind of drives (only 5.25/1.2M 
or 3.5). I've been suggested to try some DOS utilities, so I'm looking 
at FreeDOS as a way to run them.


The PC is a dual boot WinXP/Linux, with each OS installed in one of the 
two connected hard disks; i would like to avoid messing with the current 
hard disks setup if possible, meaning that installing FreeDOS on the 
hard disk is not an option, so I burned a FreeDOS liveCD and booted 
successfully the system from there.


However, as far as I understand now both A: and B: drives are simulated 
by FreeDOS, hence my question: is there a way to boot FreeDOS from 
LiveCD AND have A: drive to refer to the physical drive, or 
alternatively to assign a different drive letter (Z:) to the physical drive?


Thanks!
Marco


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