[Freedos-user] SOLVED: Only Get Black Screen with Blinking Cursor following Installation of FreeDOS to my Machine
On Friday, March 6, 2020, 9:07:54 p.m. EST, Jerome Shidel wrote: > “Let me clarify... I don’t recommend running ZAPMBR.BAT on a > multi-boot or multi-drive system. But, it doesn’t do anything > you can’t do manually... > > Depending on a couple things. Try telling sys to update both > the system files and the boot sector... > > sys a: c: /BOTH > > Also, fdisk has some MBR specific options. Like... > > fdisk /MBR 1 > > Ether should force new boot code to the boot sector.” I’m not sure I had the syntax right on your first suggestion, but you second suggestion (‘fdisk /MBR 1’) – IT WORKED!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone for all your help! I am amazed at how quickly I got so many responses full of solid ideas for me to try. Still not sure exactly why it didn’t work off the bat, but whatever – now I know what to try when it inevitably breaks later. You guys are great. ☞ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Only Get Black Screen with Blinking Cursor following Installation of FreeDOS to my Machine
On Friday, March 6, 2020, 8:12:43 p.m. EST, Louis Santillan wrote: > “A screenshot of your boot options screen would be useful too.” http://jen-lik.es/bootm @Louis Santillan: My response to your other question is awaiting moderator approval because it was too long and exceeded 40KB., but it started by explaining: “I resized the partition to 2GB (and resized/moved all the ones after it) as one of the steps I took to try and fix the problem, decided to leave it that way. …” ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Only Get Black Screen with Blinking Cursor following Installation of FreeDOS to my Machine
On Friday, March 6, 2020, 05:20:05 p.m. EST, Louis Santillan wrote: > … “what does the following” > … “‘D:\> dir C:\*.* /w’” > … “return?” … [FDOS]·[GEMAPPS]···AUTOEXEC.BAT···COMMAND.COM···DEVICE.RAW FDCONFIG.SYS···GEM.BAT·KERNEL.SYS·NIC.TXT···SETUP.BAT SHELL.RAW···9 file(s)·252,897 bytes ·2 dir(s)···1,601,994,752 bytes free (^ w/o the dots, obviously) ‘SCREENSHOT’ [photo]: http://jen-lik.es/dirCw ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Only Get Black Screen with Blinking Cursor following Installation of FreeDOS to my Machine
On Thursday, March 5, 2020, 06:05:49 p.m. EST, Dan Schmidt wrote> … “I would create a *2GB* boot partition and format it FAT16, and install> FreeDOS to it. My recollection is that FAT32 support was a work in> progress in FreeDOS when real development ended.” > … > “I think your fundamental problem is that FreeDOS cannot successfully> boot from a 7.8GB partition formatted as FAT32. It may be able to> access other larger partitions formatted FAT32 and seen by DOS as D:,> E: or the like, once FreeDOS *is* booted, but it cannot boot *from*> one.” … I tried this ↑ first – used GParted again to either rule it out or not as the issue, resized my C: partition (flagged as bootable) to 2GB, formatted it as FAT16 [This time it put 1.99 MiB unallocated ahead of it], and re‑installed FreeDOS from the DVD: same results. No biggie though; I don’t need more than 2GB anyway, so I’ll just leave it this size.· On Thursday, March 5, 2020, 06:05:49 p.m. EST, Dan Schmidt wrote:> “Try the utilities fdisk and format, I've not had any luck using Gparted to make anything FreeDos can reliably read.”, On Thursday, March 5, 2020, 07:46:09 p.m. EST, Matej Horvat wrote:>… “I installed it manually with FDISK/FORMAT/SYS.” Next I tried using fdisk instead as suggested (↑,↑↑). I deleted the first partition, changed the display/entry units to cylinders, created a new partition located from cylinder 5 through cylinder 7669, formatted Partition 1 as FAT16 (option 6), set it as bootable, and made sure to write the table to disk before exiting. When I ran the FreeDOS install again after that, it wanted to to format again (first time it’s asked to do that – I’ve run the install several times now) so I guess I might’ve chosen the wrong FAT16 option? [GParted was detecting the filesystem type as unknown when I checked it before logging‑out of Arch Linux & shutting‑down] I typed “Yes” and it went ahead and supposedly formatted the partition as FAT32. When I checked it later however, it was showing‑up as FAT16 in both fdisk & GParted (which wasn’t showing it as anything before – weird), but bootable… restarted and STILL I get the black screen with cursor blinking. · On Friday, March 6, 2020, 01:31:53 p.m. EST, Louis Santillan wrote:> “As Matej mentioned, don't forget to ‘sys c:’ before rebooting after the install.” I did not do that ↑. I ran the live disk again after and typed “sys c:” from the prompt (this is when I discovered the filesystem was FAT16 when the installation process via DVD had said it was reformatting as FAT32, as mentioned above^^). Should it matter? Do I need to try the installation again? Partition is showing as bootable. · On Friday, March 6, 2020, 01:36:34 p.m. EST, Jerome Shidel wrote:> “It is possible that the MBR contains incompatible boot code.> There are ways to force update it.> On FreeDOS 1.2 there was a ZAPMBR.BAT that would do that. I think it is also included on 1.3-RC2. > I don’t recommend using it on a multi-boot system.” ↑ What if it’s one that’s *going* to be one, but FreeDOS is the first thing I’m installing? Could running that cause any harm? The hard drive I’m using is brand‑spanking‑new. FreeDOS is the first OS I (am trying to) put on this one. When I ran GParted the first time, it gave the an MS‑DOS/MBR layout, which came‑up as the default choice. · Obviously I’m doing something wrong here. :P ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Only Get Black Screen with Blinking Cursor following Installation of FreeDOS to my Machine
I’m trying to install FreeDOS onto the SSD hard drive of my ThinkPad W520 4284‑WZN copied to RAM from a DVD I have, using its internal DVD‑RW drive. · In the UEFI BIOS [version 8BET62WW (1.42)], I set the boot to “Legacy Only” & the ‘SATA Controller Mode Option’ to “Compatibility” mode (IDE mode). Reserved memory for UEFI Boot Manager has been disabled. · Using GParted on the latest 64‑bit version of SystemRescueCD (6.1.0), I then made a FAT32 partition as the very first partition (C:\) with 1 MiB free space preceding it, aligned to ‘Cylinder’, and made it 7.8 GB (7,439 MiB / 7.26 GiB), and labeled it as “DOS”. · After that, I inserted the FreeDOS DVD and selected the options to install everything to the C:\ drive, which all seemed to go well. · Upon rebooting however (or from cold boot), all I get is an empty black screen with a flashing underscore cursor. I’ve hit F12 on startup to bring up the Boot device List to ensure the hard drive is selected, and have tried restarting a number of times but never get anything other than the empty black screen with the blinking cursor of death. I’ve walked away for a long time and come back, but nothing ever winds‑up loading – cursor continues to blink. I’ve gone back into BIOS to ensure that all the options I changed saved properly and have not reset themselves to defaults; everything appears as I configured it. · I reinserted the live CD and from the FreeDOS prompt, ran the command “bootfix c:”. It did not fix the problem. I haven’t tried reformatting the partition and running the installation again yet; I suspect it will still do the same thing. Should I try that? Any ideas what I’ve done wrong or why it might not be working? Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer, --- Jen___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
