Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

If you read back in this thread, the problem was dealt with at length and
solved.
Dennis

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From: userbeit...@abwesend.de
Sent: Saturday, April 8, 2017 3:38 AM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

On 2017-03-24 03:46, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy
img. It doesn't fit!
> So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a
dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS.

This is not possible. The FLOPPY.img contained in
http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip is exactly
1474560 bytes big, which is the size of a 1.44 MB floppy disk.

If this image doesn't fit, no 1.44 MB image will fit on your floppy. In
other words: the image is the right size and something else must be wrong.

And there is no need to be rude. "Pilot error" is correct in this case,
and is meant to make you think - maybe it is you after all who is wrong.
To make it absolutely clear: I can confirm that this image WILL FIT on
any 1.44 MB floppy drive. I cannot confirm if it will actually boot (I
didn't test this... yet... or not that I recall at the moment) BUT it is
the right size. Thus it must be you who is wrong with the "doesn't fit"
statement.

Even so, I understand very much that installing FreeDOS is not trivial
since you need to account for so many different hardware cases. And it
is very often just a driver that is missing; the original - long lost -
driver from the driver disk supplied with the original hardware (IDE,
SCSI, CDROM, ...) for DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.1/NT 3.x... those were the
days...

Back then you would get the *then new* hardware with the driver on
floppy. Trying to install FreeDOS now, about two decades later, makes it
hard to get all the driver stuff (who preserves such things?) and
configurations right (jumpers, C/H/S in the BIOS etc. - who preserves
manuals and quick installation guides?).


Good luck! I hope you will figure it out!
(As I hope to find the time to make my 486 run FreeDOS eventually... I
didn't find the time since after the New Years holidays...)


Userbeitrag.


The answer from Dennis is correct:
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
>> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
>> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
>> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
>> SCSI CD drive.
>> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
>> 1.44 floppy.
> The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be
> installed on a CDROM.
>
> If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
> floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
> boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
> you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See
> the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 +"
>
> See http://www.freedos.org/download/
>
>> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
>> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
>> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
>> Do you have a fix for this?
> The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions
> on the download page.
> __
> Dennis


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Eric Auer
From: Eric Auer 


Hi Rugxulo,

> If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
> (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
> ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS
> clone at all all, period.

Being the most widely used does not equal being the best.

For example Linux is great for certain use cases and this
is not changed by "but millions already have Windows" as
an argument to use Windows instead for those use cases...

Similarily, FreeDOS gives you a lot of DOS, a lot newer
than the early 1990s Microsoft version, often in a much
smaller package both in terms of disk space and in terms
of the amount of RAM needed. And newer drivers :-)

On the other hand, all DOS clones have to be extremely
similar to MS DOS when it comes to supporting software
apps for DOS. Because if you first have to port your
XYZ app for Linux to "the cool new OS ABC" which also
behaves a bit like DOS, then most users would simply
use XYZ directly in Linux and not care about DOS. But
as FreeDOS and other clones basically run ALL the good
old software for DOS, clones are clearly attractive.

Note that if you want to use more than 1 core of your
CPU or more than 4 GB of RAM, then DOS is not for you.

A multi tasking 64 bit OS will make you more happy then
and nobody complains about a few GB of disk space there.

A reason to use FreeDOS in spite of already having MS DOS:

Your new hardware has bad support from MS DOS and you want
to have more RAM free and a few new drivers. Of course you
are free to achieve that by MIXING the best files from both
versions of DOS, as you already owned MS DOS in my example.

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread userbeit...@abwesend.de
From: userbeit...@abwesend.de


On 2017-03-24 03:46, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy
img. It doesn't fit!
> So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a
dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS.

This is not possible. The FLOPPY.img contained in
http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip is exactly
1474560 bytes big, which is the size of a 1.44 MB floppy disk.

If this image doesn't fit, no 1.44 MB image will fit on your floppy. In
other words: the image is the right size and something else must be wrong.

And there is no need to be rude. "Pilot error" is correct in this case,
and is meant to make you think - maybe it is you after all who is wrong.
To make it absolutely clear: I can confirm that this image WILL FIT on
any 1.44 MB floppy drive. I cannot confirm if it will actually boot (I
didn't test this... yet... or not that I recall at the moment) BUT it is
the right size. Thus it must be you who is wrong with the "doesn't fit"
statement.

Even so, I understand very much that installing FreeDOS is not trivial
since you need to account for so many different hardware cases. And it
is very often just a driver that is missing; the original - long lost -
driver from the driver disk supplied with the original hardware (IDE,
SCSI, CDROM, ...) for DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.1/NT 3.x... those were the
days...

Back then you would get the *then new* hardware with the driver on
floppy. Trying to install FreeDOS now, about two decades later, makes it
hard to get all the driver stuff (who preserves such things?) and
configurations right (jumpers, C/H/S in the BIOS etc. - who preserves
manuals and quick installation guides?).


Good luck! I hope you will figure it out!
(As I hope to find the time to make my 486 run FreeDOS eventually... I
didn't find the time since after the New Years holidays...)


Userbeitrag.


The answer from Dennis is correct:
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton  wrote:
>> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
>> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
>> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
>> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
>> SCSI CD drive.
>> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
>> 1.44 floppy.
> The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be
> installed on a CDROM.
>
> If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
> floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
> boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
> you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See
> the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 -+"
>
> See http://www.freedos.org/download/
>
>> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
>> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
>> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
>> Do you have a fix for this?
> The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions
> on the download page.
> __
> Dennis


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Rugxulo
From: Rugxulo 

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 7:20 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or "no advantage to MS DOS".

If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
(which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS clone at
all, period.

Various DOS clones exist, and they all have minor advantages, but
overall they work the same (no extra APIs offered, no utilizing newer
advanced cpu features). For common DOS software (and loadable
drivers), they all behave effectively the same (more or less) on any
decent DOS kernel.

Reasons not to use MS-DOS? It's unsupported and proprietary and harder to find.
Reasons not to use FreeDOS? You just want to run the exact same
software that already runs perfectly on your current MS-DOS install.

Heck, apparently there are still people using TAWK, which is
(apparently) proprietary and long dead. One guy was complaining that
GAWK (aka, GPL) still doesn't 100% equal TAWK features despite being
20 years newer. Sound familiar? Old habits die hard.

(In hindsight, it's best to not write proprietary, non-standard,
unportable software at all, if you have a choice. Although nothing
lasts forever, not even standards, it does certainly help to try to be
portable/cross-platform from the start.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Ralf Quint
From: Ralf Quint 

On 3/24/2017 4:36 PM, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> I want the fat32 in order to see drives and files on my win98 computer if I
use Laplink. I was also hoping FreeDOS will do a better job of getting Arachne
online. It reports low memory with MS-DOS. I have run memmaker several times.
Using FAT32 does not help you in seeing drives and files on another
computer, either via laplink or by other means. This is either handled
by the program itself (as in the case of Laplink) or it is matter of the
network redirector being used...

As for being low on memory, the main source of your problems are likely
being the use of the SCSI/ASPI drivers as you mentioned in a previous
post. Those things are/were huge in terms of DOS in general. FreeDOS
won't give you here much of an advantage over any other DOS...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

Don't need a network card with a dial-up modem. As for packet driver, Arachne
comes with some. I am definately willing to try other browsers.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:44 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 6:36 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I want the fat32 in order to see drives and files on my win98 computer if I
use Laplink.

Okay, but that's only the kernel (and boot sector to load it), not all
of the other files. Any single floppy could handle that minimal
"install" for you.

> I was also hoping FreeDOS will do a better job of getting Arachne online. It
reports
> low memory with MS-DOS. I have run memmaker several times.

Unlikely to help much by itself, but who knows.

Not to discourage use of Arachne by any means, but there are other web
browsers as well, e.g. Links2 (which is 386+ DPMI, thus less stingy
about memory):

http://links.twibright.com/download/binaries/dos/

(grab links-2.14.exe and links.crt)

But, again, that assumes a working packet driver and supported network
card. So you do actually have one??

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Jerome Shidel
From: Jerome Shidel 




> On Mar 24, 2017, at 6:40 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>
> Hi Dennis,
>
>> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as
>> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
>> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
>> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.
>
> Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
> and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
> used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
> from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
> of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
> MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
> for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

I'd advise just plugging in his needed lines into the new configuration files.
But, what ever is easiest.

>
> Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
> tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
> C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs

If his old MS-DOS install is not under the FDOS\ directory (unless changed in
advanced mode), it will just ignore it. That goes for other directories as
well. If the existing target directory (Like FDOS\) for the OS already exists,
it will be backed up and the cleaned out.

> Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
> files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
> use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Yes, always backup!

Jerome

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>


Also, I'm curious. The 486 is not my main computer. It is a hobby project.
While I would be disappointed is anything was lost in the transition, it
wouldn't be the end of the world.
I'm taking a break now. Please don't be offended if you post something and I
don't respond immediately. I will let you all know how this works out.
Dennis

Sent-afrom-amy-aBlackBerry-a10-asmartphone-aon-athe-aBell-anetwork.
-a Original Message -a
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:17 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as its
only OS.
> My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The
SCSI
> drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of
MSCDEX.EXE.

If you have anything more important than games (and/or don't have the
original installation media for them and/or the disks for the version
of MS-DOS you're using), then maybe you shouldn't quite install
FreeDOS "just yet"! Especially any personal files (personal docs,
sources, game saves, registration keys), make sure to back those up
several times!

It might be safer to use a separate hard drive entirely for FreeDOS so
that you don't risk deleting anything important. You never did mention
if you have a working packet driver (I'll assume not), but it might
make backing up files a lot easier.

If you just want to play around with FreeDOS, just use a bootable
floppy (as suggested), which will minimally let you use the FD kernel
with all of your pre-existing utils. Honestly, if you already have
MS-DOS, then you probably aren't the target audience for FreeDOS at
all. (Not to be pessimistic, but FreeDOS doesn't normally offer much
more, by itself, over MS-DOS. Although it does support FAT32, unlike
MS-DOS v6 [FAT12/16 only], which can be more efficient for large
drives.)

You don't technically "need" two different kernels (but maybe you want
to compare). In that case, MetaKern may be of interest to you:

http://freedos.gds.tuwien.ac.at/freedos/news/technote/184.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/metakern/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>


I want the fat32 in order to see drives and files on my win98 computer if I use
Laplink. I was also hoping FreeDOS will do a better job of getting Arachne
online. It reports low memory with MS-DOS. I have run memmaker several times.

Sent-afrom-amy-aBlackBerry-a10-asmartphone-aon-athe-aBell-anetwork.
-a Original Message -a
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:17 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as its
only OS.
> My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The
SCSI
> drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of
MSCDEX.EXE.

If you have anything more important than games (and/or don't have the
original installation media for them and/or the disks for the version
of MS-DOS you're using), then maybe you shouldn't quite install
FreeDOS "just yet"! Especially any personal files (personal docs,
sources, game saves, registration keys), make sure to back those up
several times!

It might be safer to use a separate hard drive entirely for FreeDOS so
that you don't risk deleting anything important. You never did mention
if you have a working packet driver (I'll assume not), but it might
make backing up files a lot easier.

If you just want to play around with FreeDOS, just use a bootable
floppy (as suggested), which will minimally let you use the FD kernel
with all of your pre-existing utils. Honestly, if you already have
MS-DOS, then you probably aren't the target audience for FreeDOS at
all. (Not to be pessimistic, but FreeDOS doesn't normally offer much
more, by itself, over MS-DOS. Although it does support FAT32, unlike
MS-DOS v6 [FAT12/16 only], which can be more efficient for large
drives.)

You don't technically "need" two different kernels (but maybe you want
to compare). In that case, MetaKern may be of interest to you:

http://freedos.gds.tuwien.ac.at/freedos/news/technote/184.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/metakern/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

Thanks Eric.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: Eric Auer
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 7:21 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


A backup on the same disk but different partitions
does not really help you if things go really wrong,
but as you say, data loss would be no real problem
for you... You should probably backup at least the
DOS SCSI drivers though ;-) Jerome also mentioned
the drivers as being the most backup worthy files.

As Jerome wrote, you can simply install to C:\FDOS
and leave most of the rest of C: and D: unharmed.
Outside the FDOS directory, only the config files
(autoexec / config / fdconfig / similar) and boot
files (kernel, maybe command) in the root directory
of C:\ and the boot sector should get overwritten,
not much else to worry about UNLESS you format or
fdisk... In which case everything would be gone.

As you already have some DOS (here: MS DOS) on the
PC, I agree with Jerome that "not booted update" is
worth a trying for a "smoother" change to FreeDOS.

I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or
"no advantage to MS DOS". Examples of advantages:

Several drivers are smaller in RAM compared to MS
DOS versions, FreeDOS supports FAT32 and LBA :-)

In particular, this means that you can (if your
BIOS is not too old) harddisks up to 2 TB size
and partitions of many GB size without problems.

Regards, Eric

> My internal hard drive is partitioned into C and D drives. The entire
> contents of the C:\DOS directory is backed up on drive D. I also have
> an MS-DOS boot disk that includes my current autoexec.bat and
> config.sys files.


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dale E Sterner
From: Dale E Sterner 

Has anyone noticed that on Ebay someone is selling
a new HP mini with FREEDOS as its OS.
Straight from the factory with FREEDOS no setting up.


DS



On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 20:32:15 -0500 Dennis Fenton 
writes:
> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the
> external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.
> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can
> an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get
> it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?
>
>
-
-
> Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
> engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
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**
>From Dale Sterner - MS organic chemistry
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***


Police Urge Americans to Carry This With Them at All Times
The Observer
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/58d692d3b3aad12d31f69st02duc

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Eric Auer
From: Eric Auer 


A backup on the same disk but different partitions
does not really help you if things go really wrong,
but as you say, data loss would be no real problem
for you... You should probably backup at least the
DOS SCSI drivers though ;-) Jerome also mentioned
the drivers as being the most backup worthy files.

As Jerome wrote, you can simply install to C:\FDOS
and leave most of the rest of C: and D: unharmed.
Outside the FDOS directory, only the config files
(autoexec / config / fdconfig / similar) and boot
files (kernel, maybe command) in the root directory
of C:\ and the boot sector should get overwritten,
not much else to worry about UNLESS you format or
fdisk... In which case everything would be gone.

As you already have some DOS (here: MS DOS) on the
PC, I agree with Jerome that "not booted update" is
worth a trying for a "smoother" change to FreeDOS.

I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or
"no advantage to MS DOS". Examples of advantages:

Several drivers are smaller in RAM compared to MS
DOS versions, FreeDOS supports FAT32 and LBA :-)

In particular, this means that you can (if your
BIOS is not too old) harddisks up to 2 TB size
and partitions of many GB size without problems.

Regards, Eric

> My internal hard drive is partitioned into C and D drives. The entire
> contents of the C:\DOS directory is backed up on drive D. I also have
> an MS-DOS boot disk that includes my current autoexec.bat and
> config.sys files.


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Rugxulo
From: Rugxulo 


Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Dennis Fenton  wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as its
only OS.
> My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The
SCSI
> drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of
MSCDEX.EXE.

If you have anything more important than games (and/or don't have the
original installation media for them and/or the disks for the version
of MS-DOS you're using), then maybe you shouldn't quite install
FreeDOS "just yet"! Especially any personal files (personal docs,
sources, game saves, registration keys), make sure to back those up
several times!

It might be safer to use a separate hard drive entirely for FreeDOS so
that you don't risk deleting anything important. You never did mention
if you have a working packet driver (I'll assume not), but it might
make backing up files a lot easier.

If you just want to play around with FreeDOS, just use a bootable
floppy (as suggested), which will minimally let you use the FD kernel
with all of your pre-existing utils. Honestly, if you already have
MS-DOS, then you probably aren't the target audience for FreeDOS at
all. (Not to be pessimistic, but FreeDOS doesn't normally offer much
more, by itself, over MS-DOS. Although it does support FAT32, unlike
MS-DOS v6 [FAT12/16 only], which can be more efficient for large
drives.)

You don't technically "need" two different kernels (but maybe you want
to compare). In that case, MetaKern may be of interest to you:

http://freedos.gds.tuwien.ac.at/freedos/news/technote/184.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/metakern/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Ira Minor
From: Ira Minor <ira.mi...@gmail.com>

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If you already have Windows 98 SE, you have DOS 7.1. I prefer it to FreeDOS
because of better documentation.

Ira

irami...@gmail.com  805-212-0588

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 8:26 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Eric.
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
>   Original Message
> From: Eric Auer
> Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 7:21 PM
> To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk
>
>
> A backup on the same disk but different partitions
> does not really help you if things go really wrong,
> but as you say, data loss would be no real problem
> for you... You should probably backup at least the
> DOS SCSI drivers though ;-) Jerome also mentioned
> the drivers as being the most backup worthy files.
>
> As Jerome wrote, you can simply install to C:\FDOS
> and leave most of the rest of C: and D: unharmed.
> Outside the FDOS directory, only the config files
> (autoexec / config / fdconfig / similar) and boot
> files (kernel, maybe command) in the root directory
> of C:\ and the boot sector should get overwritten,
> not much else to worry about UNLESS you format or
> fdisk... In which case everything would be gone.
>
> As you already have some DOS (here: MS DOS) on the
> PC, I agree with Jerome that "not booted update" is
> worth a trying for a "smoother" change to FreeDOS.
>
> I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or
> "no advantage to MS DOS". Examples of advantages:
>
> Several drivers are smaller in RAM compared to MS
> DOS versions, FreeDOS supports FAT32 and LBA :-)
>
> In particular, this means that you can (if your
> BIOS is not too old) harddisks up to 2 TB size
> and partitions of many GB size without problems.
>
> Regards, Eric
>
> > My internal hard drive is partitioned into C and D drives. The entire
> > contents of the C:\DOS directory is backed up on drive D. I also have
> > an MS-DOS boot disk that includes my current autoexec.bat and
> > config.sys files.
>
>
> 
> --
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> 
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--001a1148df5c151ae4054b865f99
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

If
you already have Windows 98 SE, you have DOS 7.1. I prefer it to FreeDOS
because of better documentation.Iramailto:irami...@gmail.com; target="_blank">irami...@gmail.com
-a805-212-0588
On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 8:26 PM, Dennis Fenton
mailto:dwf...@gmail.com;
target="_blank">dwf...@gmail.com wrote:Thanks Eric.

Sent-afrom-amy-aBlackBerry-a10-asmartphone-aon-athe-aBell-anetwork.
-a Original Message -a
From: Eric Auer
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 7:21 PM
To: mailto:freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net;>freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about
FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


A backup on the same disk but
different partitions
does not really help you if things go really wrong,
but as you say, data loss would be no real problem
for you... You should probably backup at least the
DOS SCSI drivers though ;-) Jerome also mentioned
the drivers as being the most backup worthy files.

As Jerome wrote, you can simply install to C:\FDOS
and leave most of the rest of C: and D: unharmed.
Outside the FDOS directory, only the config files
(autoexec / config / fdconfig / similar) and boot
files (kernel, maybe command) in the root directory
of C:\ and the boot sector should get overwritten,
not much else to worry about UNLESS you format or
fdisk... In which case everything would be gone.

As you already have some DOS (here: MS DOS) on the
PC, I agree with Jerome that not booted update is
worth a trying for a

Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Jerome Shidel
From: Jerome Shidel <jer...@shidel.net>




> On Mar 24, 2017, at 6:15 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as its
only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed
programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own
equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.
>

Ok, this is my advice.

First backup:
Create a MS-DOS boot floppy as a backup. That way if things go sideways you
have a working boot disk with your needed drivers.

Next Test:
Without messing around with the FreeDOS install floppy, just boot it. It should
work fine up to the "Gathering information" message. Then it would give you an
error stating it cannot find the packages. You can then quit to The command
prompt and look around. If you see drive C:, then let's try the "not booted
upgrade" (NBU) install method or two drive (DOSBox) method.

Install:
The two drive method has you copy the contents of the CD to a separate drive.
Then boot/run the FreeDOS setup program.

The NBU method may be easiest for you. Basically, you just boot the system like
normal. Then insert the floppy and CD. Go to drive A: and run "Setup". Make
sure you let it backup your current OS! You may want to clean as much as
possible out of your existing config.sys and autoexec.bat before using the
upgrade method. That way there are fewer chances of a conflict occurring.

Note:
The NBU method is not an "official" way of installing an OS. It may fail
horribly. That being said, I did what I could to get it to function properly.
And, it worked fine in the limited testing I did with NBU installs.

Jerome

> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
>   Original Message
> From: Eric Auer
> Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 4:33 PM
> To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk
>
>
> Hi Dennis,
>
>> I downloaded and installed WinImage 9.0 on my win98 computer. It has a
>> floppy drive. I successfully wrote the img file to a floppy.
>> Another issue occurred to me. My cd-rom drive is a SCSI external type.
>
> That might be a problem, depending on your SCSI controller
> and whether it has good BIOS support etc etc. I assume you
> refer to the CD-ROM of the PC where you want to install DOS?
>
> By the way, does that PC also have another operating system?
> Do you want to replace that by DOS? Or install both side by
> side as "dual boot"? The latter requires special steps, the
> former can mean that current disk contents get overwritten.
>
>> The new boot floppy has an fdconfig.sys and an autoexecrCA.bat file. I'm
thinking
>> I need to add lines to both to recognize the SCSI drive when it boots.
>
> If you have good DOS drivers for the drive and know how to
> configure them, then you can do that. If you plan to install
> DOS on a computer where you already have or can install some
> operating system with easy internet, then I would recommend
> another method: Copy the ISO file of FreeDOS to a FAT drive
> on the PC where you want to install DOS and then "mount" it
> as if it would be the CD of FreeDOS :-) If the boot floppy
> has no automatic support for that, then I am sure that some
> extra explanation of this trick could be given by Rugxulo or
> Jerome, with examples of what to put where in fdconfig and
> autoexec on the boot floppy :-)
>
> The idea is that you need no hardware specific drivers at all
> to open the ISO if you already have it on the future DOS PC,
> so you avoid all worries about SCSI and CDROM drivers then.
>
> You still do need that special ISO driver, of course, but as
> that is not specific to certain hardware, it is easy to use.
>
> Cheers, Eric
>
>
>
> --
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Ralf Quint
From: Ralf Quint 

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--===4382838559081096216==
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="4D1B7CFD38F21CC1995B7B76"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
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Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On 3/23/2017 9:47 PM, Gregg Eshelman wrote:
> It is possible to format a floppy a bit over size. Most drives will
> accommodate 2 to 4 extra tracks. Depending on the drive and the
> controller it's possible to alter the number of sectors per track, but
> all tracks must have the same number of sectors. Typically, altering
> the number of sectors renders the format non-bootable.
>
> Schenk & Horn CopyStar is one such program. It's old, originally from
> 1994, but it's known to work on Windows 2000, Server 2003 and older.
> I've not tried it on XP and later. Probably not compatible with 64 bit
> Windows. http://www.programfiles.com/Default.asp?LinkId=13681
>
> Microsoft used an over-capacity format they called DMF. For programs
> (like Windows 95) where the first disk had to be bootable it was
> standard 1.44M.
>
> IBM used a different over-capacity format for OS/2's install disks,
> but nothing included with OS/2 could write data to the disks, despite
> the inclusion of a utility to create blank disks with that format.
> (The largest all floppy install I ever did was OS/2 Warp 3.0, followed
> by a couple of large updates.)
Sorry, but all that is irrelevant to the problem at hand. He tried to
copy an image file, that includes the file system as a single file onto
a floppy disk that already contained a file system. He needed to use a
program that write that image file sector by sector onto a floppy disk.
And that way it will fit perfectly, no overformatting needed...
>
> If only the entire OEM computer industry had wholeheartedly adopted
> the 2.88M floppy, instead of only IBM and Compaq sorta halfway
> supporting it. "Hey look! We're making 2.88M floppy drives standard on
> ALL our computers! How about YOU, Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell,
> Gateway 2000... *Apple*? You wanna fall behind us? Keep using that
> obsolete 1.44M!"
The problem with the general adaptation of 2.88MB floppy disks was that
those drives did have compatibility issues with reliably reading and
more so, WRITING 1.44MB disks...

Ralf


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On 3/23/2017 9:47 PM, Gregg Eshelman
  wrote:


  
It is possible
  to format a floppy a bit over size. Most drives will
  accommodate 2 to 4 extra tracks. Depending on the drive and
  the controller it's possible to alt
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

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  Thanks



 SentfrommyBlackBerry10smartphoneontheBellnetwork.



From: Ralf QuintSent: Friday, March 24, 2017 
12:15 PMTo: 
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.netReply To: Discussion 
and general questions about FreeDOS.Subject: Re: 
[Freedos-user] boot floppy disk ima
ge too big for a disk




On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton
  wrote:


  I
was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space
message. 

That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY
sector on the disk. That includes those of the boot sector (includes
the BPB-BIOS Paramter Block), 14 sectors for the root directory and
18 sectors for the two copies of FAT12. Those 33 sectors leave on a
formatted 1.44MB floppy disk 2847 sectors (out of 2880 sectors of an
unformatted disk).

To write a floppy disk IMAGE to a floppy, you need a program that
writes that image SECTOR FOR SECTOR back to the disk, not as a
single file as you have tried.

On Unix/Linux systems, the easiest way to achive that is to use the
"dd" command or WinRaWrite on a Windows system (or rawrite if you
have another DOS only system). I personally used for probably more
than two decades by now a Shareware program called WinImage, which
also does works nicely to create quickly images from floppy disks or
CD-ROMs...

Ralf
  


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Eric Auer
From: Eric Auer 



Hi Dennis,

> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as
> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.

Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs.

Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>


Check!

Sent-afrom-amy-aBlackBerry-a10-asmartphone-aon-athe-aBell-anetwork.
-a Original Message -a
From: Eric Auer
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 5:41 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


Hi Dennis,

> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as
> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.

Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs.

Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Ralf Quint
From: Ralf Quint 

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--===1656748613992134465==
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="3E16757BA8FAC21C53D0B19F"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--3E16757BA8FAC21C53D0B19F
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> I was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space message.
That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY sector
on the disk. That includes those of the boot sector (includes the
BPB-BIOS Paramter Block),  14 sectors for the root directory and 18
sectors for the two copies of FAT12. Those 33 sectors leave on a
formatted 1.44MB floppy disk 2847 sectors (out of 2880 sectors of an
unformatted disk).

To write a floppy disk IMAGE to a floppy, you need a program that writes
that image SECTOR FOR SECTOR back to the disk, not as a single file as
you have tried.

On Unix/Linux systems, the easiest way to achive that is to use the "dd"
command or WinRaWrite on a Windows system (or rawrite if you have
another DOS only system). I personally used for probably more than two
decades by now a Shareware program called WinImage, which also does
works nicely to create quickly images from floppy disks or CD-ROMs...

Ralf


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On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton
  wrote:


  I
was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space
message. 

That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

Thanks. I'll try.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: Jerome Shidel
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 7:17 AM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


> On Mar 23, 2017, at 11:56 PM, Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes,
2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
> would not fit here either.

I see where the confusion may be coming from.

After formatting a floppy image using FreeDOS, it states:

1,474,560 bytes total disk space (disk size)
1,456,664 bytes available on disk (free clusters)

It would appear that the number 1457664 is the usable empty free space on the
disk once it has been low level formatted and then formatted with the standard
DOS file system. So, you probably do have a correct sized floppy diskette.
However, you will need to use the appropriate tool to place the floppy image
file onto the diskette. Other messages in this thread mention programs like
rawrite & dd. These all work very well for this task.

Jerome
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

I see.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: Eric Auer
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 11:38 AM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


Hi Felix and Dennis,

> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes,
2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
> would not fit here either.

That is a misunderstanding. The FLOPPY really is 80 tracks, 2 sides,
18 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector: 1474560 bytes is correct.

However, if you want to put a FILE on a floppy, then the maximum
size for the FILE is less, because some space is used by the FAT
filesystem. So 1457664 is the size left for you to put files on.

This is why the boot floppy disk image has to be copied with some
special tools (Linux: dd, DOS: diskcopy, Windows: ..., Mac: ...)
which copy contents, filesystem, boot sector etc. all at once.

This also is why you do not see files IN that single image file
in FD12FLOPPY.zip: You would have to "open" the file as a FAT
filesystem to see the files that you will later see on your disk
after putting the diskimage as a whole on the floppy.

If we would offer the files separately in the ZIP, you would be
able to see and edit them at once, which is good, BUT you would
need a separate tool to install a boot sector to make it bootable,
which is inconvenient, because SYS is only available for DOS and
similar tools for other OS (like makebootfat or sys-freedos.pl
for Linux) would need specific command line options to produce
optimized DOS boot sectors.

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>


The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currentlyrCA has MS-DOS 6.22 as its only
OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The
SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of
MSCDEX.EXE.

Sent-afrom-amy-aBlackBerry-a10-asmartphone-aon-athe-aBell-anetwork.
-a Original Message -a
From: Eric Auer
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 4:33 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


Hi Dennis,

> I downloaded and installed WinImage 9.0 on my win98 computer. It has a
> floppy drive. I successfully wrote the img file to a floppy.
> Another issue occurred to me. My cd-rom drive is a SCSI external type.

That might be a problem, depending on your SCSI controller
and whether it has good BIOS support etc etc. I assume you
refer to the CD-ROM of the PC where you want to install DOS?

By the way, does that PC also have another operating system?
Do you want to replace that by DOS? Or install both side by
side as "dual boot"? The latter requires special steps, the
former can mean that current disk contents get overwritten.

> The new boot floppy has an fdconfig.sys and an autoexecrCA.bat file. I'm
thinking
> I need to add lines to both to recognize the SCSI drive when it boots.

If you have good DOS drivers for the drive and know how to
configure them, then you can do that. If you plan to install
DOS on a computer where you already have or can install some
operating system with easy internet, then I would recommend
another method: Copy the ISO file of FreeDOS to a FAT drive
on the PC where you want to install DOS and then "mount" it
as if it would be the CD of FreeDOS :-) If the boot floppy
has no automatic support for that, then I am sure that some
extra explanation of this trick could be given by Rugxulo or
Jerome, with examples of what to put where in fdconfig and
autoexec on the boot floppy :-)

The idea is that you need no hardware specific drivers at all
to open the ISO if you already have it on the future DOS PC,
so you avoid all worries about SCSI and CDROM drivers then.

You still do need that special ISO driver, of course, but as
that is not specific to certain hardware, it is easy to use.

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Eric Auer
From: Eric Auer 


Hi Felix and Dennis,

> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes,
2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
> would not fit here either.

That is a misunderstanding. The FLOPPY really is 80 tracks, 2 sides,
18 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector: 1474560 bytes is correct.

However, if you want to put a FILE on a floppy, then the maximum
size for the FILE is less, because some space is used by the FAT
filesystem. So 1457664 is the size left for you to put files on.

This is why the boot floppy disk image has to be copied with some
special tools (Linux: dd, DOS: diskcopy, Windows: ..., Mac: ...)
which copy contents, filesystem, boot sector etc. all at once.

This also is why you do not see files IN that single image file
in FD12FLOPPY.zip: You would have to "open" the file as a FAT
filesystem to see the files that you will later see on your disk
after putting the diskimage as a whole on the floppy.

If we would offer the files separately in the ZIP, you would be
able to see and edit them at once, which is good, BUT you would
need a separate tool to install a boot sector to make it bootable,
which is inconvenient, because SYS is only available for DOS and
similar tools for other OS (like makebootfat or sys-freedos.pl
for Linux) would need specific command line options to produce
optimized DOS boot sectors.

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

--===8131631414762694562==
Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


  I downloaded and installed WinImage 9.0
on my win98 computer. It has a floppy drive. I successfully wrote the img file
to a floppy.Another issue
occurred to me. My cd-rom drive is a SCSI external type.The new boot floppy has an fdconfig.sys
and an autoexecrCA.bat file. I'm thinking I need to add lines to both to
recognize the SCSI drive when it boots.

  


 SentfrommyBlackBerry10smartphoneontheBellnetwork.



From: Ralf QuintSent: Friday, March 24, 2017 
12:15 PMTo: 
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.netReply To: Discussion 
and general questions about FreeDOS.Subject: Re: 
[Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for
 a disk




On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton
  wrote:


  I
was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space
message. 

That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY
sector on the disk. That includes those of the boot sector (includes
the BPB-BIOS Paramter Block), 14 sectors for the root directory and
18 sectors for the two copies of FAT12. Those 33 sectors leave on a
formatted 1.44MB floppy disk 2847 sectors (out of 2880 sectors of an
unformatted disk).

To write a floppy disk IMAGE to a floppy, you need a program that
writes that image SECTOR FOR SECTOR back to the disk, not as a
single file as you have tried.

On Unix/Linux systems, the easiest way to achive that is to use the
"dd" command or WinRaWrite on a Windows system (or rawrite if you
have another DOS only system). I personally used for probably more
than two decades by now a Shareware program called WinImage, which
also does works nicely to create quickly images from floppy disks or
CD-ROMs...

Ralf
  


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[Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton 

After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
SCSI CD drive.
To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
1.44 floppy.
This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
Do you have a fix for this?

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Jerome Shidel
From: Jerome Shidel 


A 1.44MB 3.5rCY DS HD floppy disk is 1,474,560 bytes when formatted. (2MB
unformatted)

It used 512 byte sectors, 18 sectors per track, 80 tracks per side and is/was a
two sided media.

512 * 18 * 80 * 2 = 1474560 / 1024 = 1.44MB floppy.

More information on this can be found at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats

Also, on Mac, Unix and Linux dd will write the disk image fine with a command
like:

sudo dd if=FD12FLOPPY.img of=/dev/fd0

(or similar)

As a side note, PC-DOS 7 used oddly formatted diskettes for its install media.
These provided a capacity lager than 1.44MB on its 3.5rCY install media. This
was good to reduce the number of diskettes required. But, it made it more
difficult to clone the original floppy disks for backup purposes. Also, it was
not 100% compatible with all floppy drives and could cause other headaches as
well.

Jerome
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Gregg Eshelman
From: Gregg Eshelman <g_ala...@yahoo.com>

--===5062282711183416658==
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="=_Part_1937484_1016577170.1490330874749"
Content-Length: 7708

--=_Part_1937484_1016577170.1490330874749
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

It is possible to format a floppy a bit over size. Most drives will accommodate
2 to 4 extra tracks. Depending on the drive and the controller it's possible to
alter the number of sectors per track, but all tracks must have the same number
of sectors. Typically, altering the number of sectors renders the format
non-bootable.

Schenk & Horn CopyStar is one such program. It's old, originally from 1994, but
it's known to work on Windows 2000, Server 2003 and older. I've not tried it on
XP and later. Probably not compatible with 64 bit Windows.
http://www.programfiles.com/Default.asp?LinkId=13681

Microsoft used an over-capacity format they called DMF. For programs (like
Windows 95) where the first disk had to be bootable it was standard 1.44M.
IBM used a different over-capacity format for OS/2's install disks, but nothing
included with OS/2 could write data to the disks, despite the inclusion of a
utility to create blank disks with that format. (The largest all floppy install
I ever did was OS/2 Warp 3.0, followed by a couple of large updates.)

If only the entire OEM computer industry had wholeheartedly adopted the 2.88M
floppy, instead of only IBM and Compaq sorta halfway supporting it. "Hey look!
We're making 2.88M floppy drives standard on ALL our computers! How about YOU,
Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, Gateway 2000... *Apple*? You wanna fall behind
us? Keep using that obsolete 1.44M!"

  From: Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net>
 To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
 Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:57 PM
 Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
"boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 2847

512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
would not fit here either.
-- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

-a Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata-a ***-a http://fm.no-ip.com/


--=_Part_1937484_1016577170.1490330874749
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

It
is possible to format a floppy a bit over size. Most drives will accommodate 2
to 4 extra tracks. Depending on the drive and the controller it's possible to
alter the number of sectors per track, but all tracks must have the same number
of sectors. Typically, altering the number of sectors renders the format
non-bootable.Schenk  Horn CopyStar is one 
such program. It's old, originally from 1994, but it's known to work on Windows 
2000, Server 2003 and older. I've not tried it on XP and later. Probably not 
compatible with 64 bit Windows. http://www.programfiles.com/Default.asp?LinkId=13681; 
id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1490315626629_169281" 
class="">http://www.programfiles.com/Default.asp?LinkId=13681Microsoft used an 
over-capacity format they called DMF. For programs (like Windows 95) where the 
first disk had to be bootable it was standard 1.44M.IBM used a different over-capacity 
format for OS/2's install disks, but nothing included with OS/2 could write 
data to the disks, despite the inclusion of a utility to create blank disks 
with that format. (The largest all floppy install I ever did was OS/2 Warp 3.0, 
followed by a couple of large updates.)If only the entire OEM computer 
industry had wholeheartedly adopted the 2.88M floppy, instead of only IBM and 
Compaq sorta halfway supporting it. "Hey look! We're making 2.88M floppy drives 
standard on ALL our computers! How about YOU, Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, 
Gateway 2000... *Apple*? You wanna fall behind us? Keep using that obsolete 
1.44M!"   From: Felix Miata 
mrma...@earthlink.net To: 
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net  Sent: Thursday, March 
23, 2017 9:57 PM Subject: Re: 
[Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk   
I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip; 
target="_blank" 
id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1490315626629_169218">http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
 "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 
1457664 total bytes, 2847 512 byte sectors. The image 
downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded image would not 
fit here either.-- "The wise are known for their 
understanding, and pleasantwords are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User

Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a dis

2017-05-06 Thread Thomas Mueller
From: "Thomas Mueller" 

from Dennis Fenton:

> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.
> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?

Is this the floppy image?

http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip

I just found it on FreeDOS download page.

But if too big to fit on 1.44 floppy, could you boot the image with grub4dos
(latest and final version is 0.4.4)?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

I have booted "floppy" images far too big to fit on actual floppy.

Otherwise, you could possibly use Syslinux (latest version 6.03) with memdisk,
or possibly Grub2.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Jerome Shidel
From: Jerome Shidel 


> On Mar 23, 2017, at 11:56 PM, Felix Miata  wrote:
>
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes,
2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
> would not fit here either.

I see where the confusion may be coming from.

After formatting a floppy image using FreeDOS, it states:

1,474,560 bytes total disk space (disk size)
1,456,664 bytes available on disk (free clusters)

It would appear that the number 1457664 is the usable empty free space on the
disk once it has been low level formatted and then formatted with the standard
DOS file system. So, you probably do have a correct sized floppy diskette.
However, you will need to use the appropriate tool to place the floppy image
file onto the diskette. Other messages in this thread mention programs like
rawrite & dd. These all work very well for this task.

Jerome
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread dmccunney
From: dmccunney 


On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton  wrote:
> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.

The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy.  It expects to be
installed on a CDROM.

If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
boot from.  That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy.  See
the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 -+"

See http://www.freedos.org/download/

> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?

The problem is pilot error.  Please read the applicable instructions
on the download page.
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

Thanks. I'll try diskcopy.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 12:49 AM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes,
2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
> would not fit here either.

I downloaded the above (FD12FLOPPY.zip) and two of my own images
(BARE_DOS and MetaDOS). All of them have the same size (1474560). A
simple "file *.img" tells me that they all have 2880 sectors. I've
written a few real floppies in recent years with some of these and had
no obvious problems.

The obvious tool to use, among a million others variations, would be DISKCOPY:

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/diskcopy.htm

(Here's some alternatives.)

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35297505/

> -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
> words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

So, just for completeness, (direct or indirect) links to a bunch of
(Free)DOS floppy images are found below here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35557316/

Keep in mind that a 1.44 MB floppy doesn't hold many files (e.g. a
full FD "BASE" won't fit) and isn't actively used by most users
anymore (even in FreeDOS circles). Heck, floppies aren't even made
anymore, and most modern x86 machines lack the drives (although you
can probably still buy a USB floppy drive like I did). Thus it's
somewhat ignored in favor of newer, more popular media. So there is no
"full" install via floppy, thus you must figure things out manually
(for the most part). Networking (using a working packet driver) helps
tremendously. Otherwise you're stuck with copying manually
(sneakernet).

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Felix Miata
From: Felix Miata 

I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
"boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 2847

512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
would not fit here either.
-- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

   Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Rugxulo
From: Rugxulo 

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Felix Miata  wrote:
>
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes,
2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded
image
> would not fit here either.

I downloaded the above (FD12FLOPPY.zip) and two of my own images
(BARE_DOS and MetaDOS). All of them have the same size (1474560). A
simple "file *.img" tells me that they all have 2880 sectors. I've
written a few real floppies in recent years with some of these and had
no obvious problems.

The obvious tool to use, among a million others variations, would be DISKCOPY:

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/diskcopy.htm

(Here's some alternatives.)

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35297505/

> -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
> words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

So, just for completeness, (direct or indirect) links to a bunch of
(Free)DOS floppy images are found below here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35557316/

Keep in mind that a 1.44 MB floppy doesn't hold many files (e.g. a
full FD "BASE" won't fit) and isn't actively used by most users
anymore (even in FreeDOS circles). Heck, floppies aren't even made
anymore, and most modern x86 machines lack the drives (although you
can probably still buy a USB floppy drive like I did). Thus it's
somewhat ignored in favor of newer, more popular media. So there is no
"full" install via floppy, thus you must figure things out manually
(for the most part). Networking (using a working packet driver) helps
tremendously. Otherwise you're stuck with copying manually
(sneakernet).

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy img.
It doesn't fit!
So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a
dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: dmccunney
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:26 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.

The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be
installed on a CDROM.

If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See
the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 +"

See http://www.freedos.org/download/

> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?

The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions
on the download page.
__
Dennis

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-05-06 Thread Dennis Fenton
From: Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com>

No bad sectors. I tried two different freshly formatted disks and ran scandisk
on them just to be sure.

SentafromamyaBlackBerrya10asmartphoneaonatheaBellanetwork.
a Original Message a
From: Felix Miata
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 10:30 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Dennis Fenton composed on 2017-03-23 20:32 (UTC-0500):

> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.

How much "too big"? Is it because your floppy has bad sectors. Floppies without

bad sectors are rather uncommon around here. For this reason I try to avoid
image writes, which demand all sectors in the media's spec be usable, and a
format that worked once may well be that last the media will accept without
error.

> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?--
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-04-08 Thread Dennis Fenton
If you read back in this thread, the problem was dealt with at length and 
solved.
Dennis

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: userbeit...@abwesend.de
Sent: Saturday, April 8, 2017 3:38 AM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

On 2017-03-24 03:46, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy 
> img. It doesn't fit!
> So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a 
> dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS.

This is not possible. The FLOPPY.img contained in 
http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip is exactly 
1474560 bytes big, which is the size of a 1.44 MB floppy disk.

If this image doesn't fit, no 1.44 MB image will fit on your floppy. In 
other words: the image is the right size and something else must be wrong.

And there is no need to be rude. "Pilot error" is correct in this case, 
and is meant to make you think - maybe it is you after all who is wrong. 
To make it absolutely clear: I can confirm that this image WILL FIT on 
any 1.44 MB floppy drive. I cannot confirm if it will actually boot (I 
didn't test this... yet... or not that I recall at the moment) BUT it is 
the right size. Thus it must be you who is wrong with the "doesn't fit" 
statement.

Even so, I understand very much that installing FreeDOS is not trivial 
since you need to account for so many different hardware cases. And it 
is very often just a driver that is missing; the original - long lost - 
driver from the driver disk supplied with the original hardware (IDE, 
SCSI, CDROM, ...) for DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.1/NT 3.x... those were the 
days...

Back then you would get the *then new* hardware with the driver on 
floppy. Trying to install FreeDOS now, about two decades later, makes it 
hard to get all the driver stuff (who preserves such things?) and 
configurations right (jumpers, C/H/S in the BIOS etc. - who preserves
manuals and quick installation guides?).


Good luck! I hope you will figure it out!
(As I hope to find the time to make my 486 run FreeDOS eventually... I 
didn't find the time since after the New Years holidays...)


Userbeitrag.


The answer from Dennis is correct:
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
>> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
>> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
>> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
>> SCSI CD drive.
>> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
>> 1.44 floppy.
> The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be
> installed on a CDROM.
>
> If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
> floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
> boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
> you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See
> the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 »"
>
> See http://www.freedos.org/download/
>
>> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
>> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
>> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
>> Do you have a fix for this?
> The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions
> on the download page.
> __
> Dennis


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-04-08 Thread userbeitrag
On 2017-03-24 03:46, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy 
> img. It doesn't fit!
> So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a 
> dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS.

This is not possible. The FLOPPY.img contained in 
http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip is exactly 
1474560 bytes big, which is the size of a 1.44 MB floppy disk.

If this image doesn't fit, no 1.44 MB image will fit on your floppy. In 
other words: the image is the right size and something else must be wrong.

And there is no need to be rude. "Pilot error" is correct in this case, 
and is meant to make you think - maybe it is you after all who is wrong. 
To make it absolutely clear: I can confirm that this image WILL FIT on 
any 1.44 MB floppy drive. I cannot confirm if it will actually boot (I 
didn't test this... yet... or not that I recall at the moment) BUT it is 
the right size. Thus it must be you who is wrong with the "doesn't fit" 
statement.

Even so, I understand very much that installing FreeDOS is not trivial 
since you need to account for so many different hardware cases. And it 
is very often just a driver that is missing; the original - long lost - 
driver from the driver disk supplied with the original hardware (IDE, 
SCSI, CDROM, ...) for DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.1/NT 3.x... those were the 
days...

Back then you would get the *then new* hardware with the driver on 
floppy. Trying to install FreeDOS now, about two decades later, makes it 
hard to get all the driver stuff (who preserves such things?) and 
configurations right (jumpers, C/H/S in the BIOS etc. - who preserves 
manuals and quick installation guides?).


Good luck! I hope you will figure it out!
(As I hope to find the time to make my 486 run FreeDOS eventually... I 
didn't find the time since after the New Years holidays...)


Userbeitrag.


The answer from Dennis is correct:
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton  wrote:
>> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
>> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
>> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
>> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
>> SCSI CD drive.
>> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
>> 1.44 floppy.
> The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be
> installed on a CDROM.
>
> If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
> floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
> boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
> you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See
> the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 »"
>
> See http://www.freedos.org/download/
>
>> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
>> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
>> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
>> Do you have a fix for this?
> The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions
> on the download page.
> __
> Dennis


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-28 Thread Rugxulo
Hi, Eric,

This reply may be pointless, but I'm sure you understand where I'm
coming from. In no way am I pretending that MS-DOS is technically
superior or preferred. The weakest claim is only that it is "probably"
more compatible (which is unavoidable since it's the original). It is
dead and should normally be hard to find, but hey, the OP already had
a copy, so 

On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 4:34 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
>> If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
>> (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
>> ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS
>> clone at all all, period.
>
> Being the most widely used does not equal being the best.
> Similarily, FreeDOS gives you a lot of DOS, a lot newer
> than the early 1990s Microsoft version, often in a much
> smaller package both in terms of disk space and in terms
> of the amount of RAM needed. And newer drivers :-)
>
> On the other hand, all DOS clones have to be extremely
> similar to MS DOS when it comes to supporting software
> apps for DOS. Because if you first have to port your
> XYZ app for Linux to "the cool new OS ABC" which also
> behaves a bit like DOS, then most users would simply
> use XYZ directly in Linux and not care about DOS. But
> as FreeDOS and other clones basically run ALL the good
> old software for DOS, clones are clearly attractive.
>
> A reason to use FreeDOS in spite of already having MS DOS:
>
> Your new hardware has bad support from MS DOS and you want
> to have more RAM free and a few new drivers. Of course you
> are free to achieve that by MIXING the best files from both
> versions of DOS, as you already owned MS DOS in my example.

I'm not a salesman. The OP already had MS-DOS, so it's very hard to
sell somebody a clone of what they already have. I don't even use or
recommend MS-DOS (or DR-DOS) anymore, only FreeDOS. For sure, FreeDOS
is "free"-r, much easier to use, study, modify, and redistribute. Yes,
you can still barely find MS-DOS somewhere else (legally), but it's
harder than it used to be.

Userland is not a "unique" advantage because most DOS developers these
days share tools and drivers. The kernel itself just doesn't have all
the bang/whiz/pop/flash new-fangled cpu features that users blindly
expect when a "new" version of "DOS" is released in 2017. Again, I'm
not a salesman, nor a kernel dev, so as an end user I have a hard time
pretending that FreeDOS is a bajillion times more advanced in the
kernel than the other DOSes. AFAIK, it does the same boring ol' stuff
and nothing extra fancy, providing no extra APIs, utilizing no
advanced cpu features. I just can't brag too hard when the
improvements are minor. Most of the enhancements over MS-DOS (etc) are
banal: freedom, better tools, community, etc.

So, again, FreeDOS works great, but it's a hard sell to someone else,
especially if they already have the original.

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-27 Thread Dale E Sterner
You might have trouble with sound drivers. MS dos 7.1 wanted me to use
windows
to install one so that I could enjoy Windows but no windows to use.
 FREEDOS doesn't care.


DS


On Sun, 26 Mar 2017 13:58:08 -0500 Dennis Fenton 
writes:
> Thanks to everyone on the FreeDOS list who tried to help me. I 
> learned
> a few things. After careful consideration I decided to go in a
> different direction. I installed MS-DOS 7.10. It is now running
> smoothly on my 486 laptop. I had to set up the SCSI drives by 
> writing
> a few lines into autoexec.bat and one into config.sys.
> Happy computing.
> 
> On 25/03/2017, Rugxulo  wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 7:20 PM, Eric Auer  
> wrote:
> >>
> >> I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or "no advantage 
> to MS
> >> DOS".
> >
> > If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. 
> MS-DOS
> > (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
> > ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS 
> clone at
> > all, period.
> >
> > Various DOS clones exist, and they all have minor advantages, but
> > overall they work the same (no extra APIs offered, no utilizing 
> newer
> > advanced cpu features). For common DOS software (and loadable
> > drivers), they all behave effectively the same (more or less) on 
> any
> > decent DOS kernel.
> >
> > Reasons not to use MS-DOS? It's unsupported and proprietary and 
> harder to
> > find.
> > Reasons not to use FreeDOS? You just want to run the exact same
> > software that already runs perfectly on your current MS-DOS 
> install.
> >
> > Heck, apparently there are still people using TAWK, which is
> > (apparently) proprietary and long dead. One guy was complaining 
> that
> > GAWK (aka, GPL) still doesn't 100% equal TAWK features despite 
> being
> > 20 years newer. Sound familiar? Old habits die hard.
> >
> > (In hindsight, it's best to not write proprietary, non-standard,
> > unportable software at all, if you have a choice. Although nothing
> > lasts forever, not even standards, it does certainly help to try 
> to be
> > portable/cross-platform from the start.)
> >
> > 
>
-
-
> > Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
> > engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
> > ___
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> > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
> >
> 
>
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-
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**
>From Dale Sterner - MS organic chemistry
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***


Police Urge Americans to Carry This With Them at All Times
The Observer
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/58d91a79e59d71a797f86st03duc

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-26 Thread Eric Auer

Hi Rugxulo,

> If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
> (which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
> ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS
> clone at all all, period.

Being the most widely used does not equal being the best.

For example Linux is great for certain use cases and this
is not changed by "but millions already have Windows" as
an argument to use Windows instead for those use cases...

Similarily, FreeDOS gives you a lot of DOS, a lot newer
than the early 1990s Microsoft version, often in a much
smaller package both in terms of disk space and in terms
of the amount of RAM needed. And newer drivers :-)

On the other hand, all DOS clones have to be extremely
similar to MS DOS when it comes to supporting software
apps for DOS. Because if you first have to port your
XYZ app for Linux to "the cool new OS ABC" which also
behaves a bit like DOS, then most users would simply
use XYZ directly in Linux and not care about DOS. But
as FreeDOS and other clones basically run ALL the good
old software for DOS, clones are clearly attractive.

Note that if you want to use more than 1 core of your
CPU or more than 4 GB of RAM, then DOS is not for you.

A multi tasking 64 bit OS will make you more happy then
and nobody complains about a few GB of disk space there.

A reason to use FreeDOS in spite of already having MS DOS:

Your new hardware has bad support from MS DOS and you want
to have more RAM free and a few new drivers. Of course you
are free to achieve that by MIXING the best files from both
versions of DOS, as you already owned MS DOS in my example.

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-25 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 7:20 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
>
> I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or "no advantage to MS DOS".

If you already have the original gold standard of DOSes, i.e. MS-DOS
(which was widely tested and hugely popular, by far the most
ubiquitous DOS), then you don't urgently "need" any other DOS clone at
all, period.

Various DOS clones exist, and they all have minor advantages, but
overall they work the same (no extra APIs offered, no utilizing newer
advanced cpu features). For common DOS software (and loadable
drivers), they all behave effectively the same (more or less) on any
decent DOS kernel.

Reasons not to use MS-DOS? It's unsupported and proprietary and harder to find.
Reasons not to use FreeDOS? You just want to run the exact same
software that already runs perfectly on your current MS-DOS install.

Heck, apparently there are still people using TAWK, which is
(apparently) proprietary and long dead. One guy was complaining that
GAWK (aka, GPL) still doesn't 100% equal TAWK features despite being
20 years newer. Sound familiar? Old habits die hard.

(In hindsight, it's best to not write proprietary, non-standard,
unportable software at all, if you have a choice. Although nothing
lasts forever, not even standards, it does certainly help to try to be
portable/cross-platform from the start.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Ira Minor
If you already have Windows 98 SE, you have DOS 7.1. I prefer it to FreeDOS
because of better documentation.

Ira

irami...@gmail.com  805-212-0588

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 8:26 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Eric.
>
> Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
>   Original Message
> From: Eric Auer
> Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 7:21 PM
> To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
> Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk
>
>
> A backup on the same disk but different partitions
> does not really help you if things go really wrong,
> but as you say, data loss would be no real problem
> for you... You should probably backup at least the
> DOS SCSI drivers though ;-) Jerome also mentioned
> the drivers as being the most backup worthy files.
>
> As Jerome wrote, you can simply install to C:\FDOS
> and leave most of the rest of C: and D: unharmed.
> Outside the FDOS directory, only the config files
> (autoexec / config / fdconfig / similar) and boot
> files (kernel, maybe command) in the root directory
> of C:\ and the boot sector should get overwritten,
> not much else to worry about UNLESS you format or
> fdisk... In which case everything would be gone.
>
> As you already have some DOS (here: MS DOS) on the
> PC, I agree with Jerome that "not booted update" is
> worth a trying for a "smoother" change to FreeDOS.
>
> I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or
> "no advantage to MS DOS". Examples of advantages:
>
> Several drivers are smaller in RAM compared to MS
> DOS versions, FreeDOS supports FAT32 and LBA :-)
>
> In particular, this means that you can (if your
> BIOS is not too old) harddisks up to 2 TB size
> and partitions of many GB size without problems.
>
> Regards, Eric
>
> > My internal hard drive is partitioned into C and D drives. The entire
> > contents of the C:\DOS directory is backed up on drive D. I also have
> > an MS-DOS boot disk that includes my current autoexec.bat and
> > config.sys files.
>
>
> 
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Eric Auer

A backup on the same disk but different partitions
does not really help you if things go really wrong,
but as you say, data loss would be no real problem
for you... You should probably backup at least the
DOS SCSI drivers though ;-) Jerome also mentioned
the drivers as being the most backup worthy files.

As Jerome wrote, you can simply install to C:\FDOS
and leave most of the rest of C: and D: unharmed.
Outside the FDOS directory, only the config files
(autoexec / config / fdconfig / similar) and boot
files (kernel, maybe command) in the root directory
of C:\ and the boot sector should get overwritten,
not much else to worry about UNLESS you format or
fdisk... In which case everything would be gone.

As you already have some DOS (here: MS DOS) on the
PC, I agree with Jerome that "not booted update" is
worth a trying for a "smoother" change to FreeDOS.

I disagree about FreeDOS being "not ready yet" or
"no advantage to MS DOS". Examples of advantages:

Several drivers are smaller in RAM compared to MS
DOS versions, FreeDOS supports FAT32 and LBA :-)

In particular, this means that you can (if your
BIOS is not too old) harddisks up to 2 TB size
and partitions of many GB size without problems.

Regards, Eric

> My internal hard drive is partitioned into C and D drives. The entire
> contents of the C:\DOS directory is backed up on drive D. I also have
> an MS-DOS boot disk that includes my current autoexec.bat and
> config.sys files.


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
Don't need a network card with a dial-up modem. As for packet driver, Arachne 
comes with some. I am definately willing to try other browsers.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:44 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 6:36 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I want the fat32 in order to see drives and files on my win98 computer if I 
> use Laplink.

Okay, but that's only the kernel (and boot sector to load it), not all
of the other files. Any single floppy could handle that minimal
"install" for you.

> I was also hoping FreeDOS will do a better job of getting Arachne online. It 
> reports
> low memory with MS-DOS. I have run memmaker several times.

Unlikely to help much by itself, but who knows.

Not to discourage use of Arachne by any means, but there are other web
browsers as well, e.g. Links2 (which is 386+ DPMI, thus less stingy
about memory):

http://links.twibright.com/download/binaries/dos/

(grab links-2.14.exe and links.crt)

But, again, that assumes a working packet driver and supported network
card. So you do actually have one??

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
Also, I'm curious. The 486 is not my main computer. It is a hobby project. 
While I would be disappointed is anything was lost in the transition, it 
wouldn't be the end of the world.
I'm taking a break now. Please don't be offended if you post something and I 
don't respond immediately. I will let you all know how this works out.
Dennis

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:17 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as its only 
> OS.
> My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The 
> SCSI
> drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of 
> MSCDEX.EXE.

If you have anything more important than games (and/or don't have the
original installation media for them and/or the disks for the version
of MS-DOS you're using), then maybe you shouldn't quite install
FreeDOS "just yet"! Especially any personal files (personal docs,
sources, game saves, registration keys), make sure to back those up
several times!

It might be safer to use a separate hard drive entirely for FreeDOS so
that you don't risk deleting anything important. You never did mention
if you have a working packet driver (I'll assume not), but it might
make backing up files a lot easier.

If you just want to play around with FreeDOS, just use a bootable
floppy (as suggested), which will minimally let you use the FD kernel
with all of your pre-existing utils. Honestly, if you already have
MS-DOS, then you probably aren't the target audience for FreeDOS at
all. (Not to be pessimistic, but FreeDOS doesn't normally offer much
more, by itself, over MS-DOS. Although it does support FAT32, unlike
MS-DOS v6 [FAT12/16 only], which can be more efficient for large
drives.)

You don't technically "need" two different kernels (but maybe you want
to compare). In that case, MetaKern may be of interest to you:

http://freedos.gds.tuwien.ac.at/freedos/news/technote/184.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/metakern/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Ralf Quint
On 3/24/2017 4:36 PM, Dennis Fenton wrote:
> I want the fat32 in order to see drives and files on my win98 computer if I 
> use Laplink. I was also hoping FreeDOS will do a better job of getting 
> Arachne online. It reports low memory with MS-DOS. I have run memmaker 
> several times.
Using FAT32 does not help you in seeing drives and files on another 
computer, either via laplink or by other means. This is either handled 
by the program itself (as in the case of Laplink) or it is matter of the 
network redirector being used...

As for being low on memory, the main source of your problems are likely 
being the use of the SCSI/ASPI drivers as you mentioned in a previous 
post. Those things are/were huge in terms of DOS in general. FreeDOS 
won't give you here much of an advantage over any other DOS...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
I want the fat32 in order to see drives and files on my win98 computer if I use 
Laplink. I was also hoping FreeDOS will do a better job of getting Arachne 
online. It reports low memory with MS-DOS. I have run memmaker several times.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:17 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as its only 
> OS.
> My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The 
> SCSI
> drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of 
> MSCDEX.EXE.

If you have anything more important than games (and/or don't have the
original installation media for them and/or the disks for the version
of MS-DOS you're using), then maybe you shouldn't quite install
FreeDOS "just yet"! Especially any personal files (personal docs,
sources, game saves, registration keys), make sure to back those up
several times!

It might be safer to use a separate hard drive entirely for FreeDOS so
that you don't risk deleting anything important. You never did mention
if you have a working packet driver (I'll assume not), but it might
make backing up files a lot easier.

If you just want to play around with FreeDOS, just use a bootable
floppy (as suggested), which will minimally let you use the FD kernel
with all of your pre-existing utils. Honestly, if you already have
MS-DOS, then you probably aren't the target audience for FreeDOS at
all. (Not to be pessimistic, but FreeDOS doesn't normally offer much
more, by itself, over MS-DOS. Although it does support FAT32, unlike
MS-DOS v6 [FAT12/16 only], which can be more efficient for large
drives.)

You don't technically "need" two different kernels (but maybe you want
to compare). In that case, MetaKern may be of interest to you:

http://freedos.gds.tuwien.ac.at/freedos/news/technote/184.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/metakern/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Dennis Fenton  wrote:
>
> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as its only 
> OS.
> My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my installed programs. The 
> SCSI
> drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice FreeDOS has its own equivalent of 
> MSCDEX.EXE.

If you have anything more important than games (and/or don't have the
original installation media for them and/or the disks for the version
of MS-DOS you're using), then maybe you shouldn't quite install
FreeDOS "just yet"! Especially any personal files (personal docs,
sources, game saves, registration keys), make sure to back those up
several times!

It might be safer to use a separate hard drive entirely for FreeDOS so
that you don't risk deleting anything important. You never did mention
if you have a working packet driver (I'll assume not), but it might
make backing up files a lot easier.

If you just want to play around with FreeDOS, just use a bootable
floppy (as suggested), which will minimally let you use the FD kernel
with all of your pre-existing utils. Honestly, if you already have
MS-DOS, then you probably aren't the target audience for FreeDOS at
all. (Not to be pessimistic, but FreeDOS doesn't normally offer much
more, by itself, over MS-DOS. Although it does support FAT32, unlike
MS-DOS v6 [FAT12/16 only], which can be more efficient for large
drives.)

You don't technically "need" two different kernels (but maybe you want
to compare). In that case, MetaKern may be of interest to you:

http://freedos.gds.tuwien.ac.at/freedos/news/technote/184.html
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/metakern/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
My internal hard drive is partitioned into C and D drives. The entire contents 
of the C:\DOS directory is backed up on drive D. I also have an MS-DOS boot 
disk that includes my current autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Jerome Shidel
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 6:05 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk



> On Mar 24, 2017, at 6:40 PM, Eric Auer <e.a...@jpberlin.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi Dennis,
> 
>> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as
>> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
>> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
>> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.
> 
> Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
> and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
> used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
> from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
> of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
> MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
> for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

I'd advise just plugging in his needed lines into the new configuration files. 
But, what ever is easiest.

> 
> Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
> tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
> C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs

If his old MS-DOS install is not under the FDOS\ directory (unless changed in 
advanced mode), it will just ignore it. That goes for other directories as 
well. If the existing target directory (Like FDOS\) for the OS already exists, 
it will be backed up and the cleaned out. 

> Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
> files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
> use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Yes, always backup! 

Jerome

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Jerome Shidel


> On Mar 24, 2017, at 6:40 PM, Eric Auer  wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi Dennis,
> 
>> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as
>> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
>> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
>> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.
> 
> Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
> and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
> used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
> from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
> of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
> MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
> for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

I'd advise just plugging in his needed lines into the new configuration files. 
But, what ever is easiest.

> 
> Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
> tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
> C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs

If his old MS-DOS install is not under the FDOS\ directory (unless changed in 
advanced mode), it will just ignore it. That goes for other directories as 
well. If the existing target directory (Like FDOS\) for the OS already exists, 
it will be backed up and the cleaned out. 

> Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
> files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
> use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Yes, always backup! 

Jerome

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
Check!

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Eric Auer
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 5:41 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


Hi Dennis,

> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as
> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.

Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs.

Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Eric Auer

Hi Dennis,

> The 486 that I plan to use FreeDOS on currently‎ has MS-DOS 6.22 as
> its only OS. My plan is to completely replace it but keep all my
> installed programs. The SCSI drivers are all in C:\SCSI and I notice
> FreeDOS has its own equivalent of MSCDEX.EXE.

Well in that case, you can simply use the existing DOS SCSI
and CDROM drivers :-) You can even keep MSCDEX until you get
used to SHSUCDX later... And you can use your existing lines
from autoexec and config for the autoexec and (fd-) config
of FreeDOS. Only if you were using the MS DOS config sys
MENU system, you will have to change some things - syntax
for menus works in a different way in FreeDOS.

Maybe Jerome and Rugxulo can give some hints about how to
tell the installer to only install FreeDOS to the existing
C: drive of your MS DOS PC without damaging other programs.

Even then, it is always very good to have a backup of all
files before updating. So if anything goes wrong, you can
use the backups to repair the damage :-)

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Eric Auer

Hi Dennis,

> I downloaded and installed WinImage 9.0 on my win98 computer. It has a
> floppy drive. I successfully wrote the img file to a floppy.
> Another issue occurred to me. My cd-rom drive is a SCSI external type.

That might be a problem, depending on your SCSI controller
and whether it has good BIOS support etc etc. I assume you
refer to the CD-ROM of the PC where you want to install DOS?

By the way, does that PC also have another operating system?
Do you want to replace that by DOS? Or install both side by
side as "dual boot"? The latter requires special steps, the
former can mean that current disk contents get overwritten.

> The new boot floppy has an fdconfig.sys and an autoexec‎.bat file. I'm 
> thinking 
> I need to add lines to both to recognize the SCSI drive when it boots.

If you have good DOS drivers for the drive and know how to
configure them, then you can do that. If you plan to install
DOS on a computer where you already have or can install some
operating system with easy internet, then I would recommend
another method: Copy the ISO file of FreeDOS to a FAT drive
on the PC where you want to install DOS and then "mount" it
as if it would be the CD of FreeDOS :-) If the boot floppy
has no automatic support for that, then I am sure that some
extra explanation of this trick could be given by Rugxulo or
Jerome, with examples of what to put where in fdconfig and
autoexec on the boot floppy :-)

The idea is that you need no hardware specific drivers at all
to open the ISO if you already have it on the future DOS PC,
so you avoid all worries about SCSI and CDROM drivers then.

You still do need that special ISO driver, of course, but as
that is not specific to certain hardware, it is easy to use.

Cheers, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
  I downloaded and installed WinImage 9.0 on my win98 computer. It has a floppy drive. I successfully wrote the img file to a floppy.Another issue occurred to me. My cd-rom drive is a SCSI external type.The new boot floppy has an fdconfig.sys and an autoexec‎.bat file. I'm thinking I need to add lines to both to recognize the SCSI drive when it boots.Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.From: Ralf QuintSent: Friday, March 24, 2017 12:15 PMTo: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.netReply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk
  

  
  
On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton
  wrote:


  I
was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space
message. 

That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY
sector on the disk. That includes those of the boot sector (includes
the BPB-BIOS Paramter Block),  14 sectors for the root directory and
18 sectors for the two copies of FAT12. Those 33 sectors leave on a
formatted 1.44MB floppy disk 2847 sectors (out of 2880 sectors of an
unformatted disk).

To write a floppy disk IMAGE to a floppy, you need a program that
writes that image SECTOR FOR SECTOR back to the disk, not as a
single file as you have tried.

On Unix/Linux systems, the easiest way to achive that is to use the
"dd" command or WinRaWrite on a Windows system (or rawrite if you
have another DOS only system). I personally used for probably more
than two decades by now a Shareware program called WinImage, which
also does works nicely to create quickly images from floppy disks or
CD-ROMs...

Ralf
  

	

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Ralf Quint

On 3/23/2017 9:47 PM, Gregg Eshelman wrote:
It is possible to format a floppy a bit over size. Most drives will 
accommodate 2 to 4 extra tracks. Depending on the drive and the 
controller it's possible to alter the number of sectors per track, but 
all tracks must have the same number of sectors. Typically, altering 
the number of sectors renders the format non-bootable.


Schenk & Horn CopyStar is one such program. It's old, originally from 
1994, but it's known to work on Windows 2000, Server 2003 and older. 
I've not tried it on XP and later. Probably not compatible with 64 bit 
Windows. http://www.programfiles.com/Default.asp?LinkId=13681


Microsoft used an over-capacity format they called DMF. For programs 
(like Windows 95) where the first disk had to be bootable it was 
standard 1.44M.


IBM used a different over-capacity format for OS/2's install disks, 
but nothing included with OS/2 could write data to the disks, despite 
the inclusion of a utility to create blank disks with that format. 
(The largest all floppy install I ever did was OS/2 Warp 3.0, followed 
by a couple of large updates.)
Sorry, but all that is irrelevant to the problem at hand. He tried to 
copy an image file, that includes the file system as a single file onto 
a floppy disk that already contained a file system. He needed to use a 
program that write that image file sector by sector onto a floppy disk. 
And that way it will fit perfectly, no overformatting needed...


If only the entire OEM computer industry had wholeheartedly adopted 
the 2.88M floppy, instead of only IBM and Compaq sorta halfway 
supporting it. "Hey look! We're making 2.88M floppy drives standard on 
ALL our computers! How about YOU, Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, 
Gateway 2000... *Apple*? You wanna fall behind us? Keep using that 
obsolete 1.44M!"
The problem with the general adaptation of 2.88MB floppy disks was that 
those drives did have compatibility issues with reliably reading and 
more so, WRITING 1.44MB disks...


Ralf


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
  ThanksSent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.From: Ralf QuintSent: Friday, March 24, 2017 12:15 PMTo: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.netReply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk
  

  
  
On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton
  wrote:


  I
was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space
message. 

That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY
sector on the disk. That includes those of the boot sector (includes
the BPB-BIOS Paramter Block),  14 sectors for the root directory and
18 sectors for the two copies of FAT12. Those 33 sectors leave on a
formatted 1.44MB floppy disk 2847 sectors (out of 2880 sectors of an
unformatted disk).

To write a floppy disk IMAGE to a floppy, you need a program that
writes that image SECTOR FOR SECTOR back to the disk, not as a
single file as you have tried.

On Unix/Linux systems, the easiest way to achive that is to use the
"dd" command or WinRaWrite on a Windows system (or rawrite if you
have another DOS only system). I personally used for probably more
than two decades by now a Shareware program called WinImage, which
also does works nicely to create quickly images from floppy disks or
CD-ROMs...

Ralf
  

	

		Virus-free. www.avast.com
		
	




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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Ralf Quint

On 3/24/2017 5:42 AM, Dennis Fenton wrote:

I was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space message.

That is to be expected.

A disk image is exactly that, a sector by sector image of EVERY sector 
on the disk. That includes those of the boot sector (includes the 
BPB-BIOS Paramter Block),  14 sectors for the root directory and 18 
sectors for the two copies of FAT12. Those 33 sectors leave on a 
formatted 1.44MB floppy disk 2847 sectors (out of 2880 sectors of an 
unformatted disk).


To write a floppy disk IMAGE to a floppy, you need a program that writes 
that image SECTOR FOR SECTOR back to the disk, not as a single file as 
you have tried.


On Unix/Linux systems, the easiest way to achive that is to use the "dd" 
command or WinRaWrite on a Windows system (or rawrite if you have 
another DOS only system). I personally used for probably more than two 
decades by now a Shareware program called WinImage, which also does 
works nicely to create quickly images from floppy disks or CD-ROMs...


Ralf


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Eric Auer

Hi Felix and Dennis,

> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip 
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 
> 2847 
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
> image 
> would not fit here either.

That is a misunderstanding. The FLOPPY really is 80 tracks, 2 sides,
18 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector: 1474560 bytes is correct.

However, if you want to put a FILE on a floppy, then the maximum
size for the FILE is less, because some space is used by the FAT
filesystem. So 1457664 is the size left for you to put files on.

This is why the boot floppy disk image has to be copied with some
special tools (Linux: dd, DOS: diskcopy, Windows: ..., Mac: ...)
which copy contents, filesystem, boot sector etc. all at once.

This also is why you do not see files IN that single image file
in FD12FLOPPY.zip: You would have to "open" the file as a FAT
filesystem to see the files that you will later see on your disk
after putting the diskimage as a whole on the floppy.

If we would offer the files separately in the ZIP, you would be
able to see and edit them at once, which is good, BUT you would
need a separate tool to install a boot sector to make it bootable,
which is inconvenient, because SYS is only available for DOS and
similar tools for other OS (like makebootfat or sys-freedos.pl
for Linux) would need specific command line options to produce
optimized DOS boot sectors.

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
Thanks. I'll try.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Jerome Shidel
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 7:17 AM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk


> On Mar 23, 2017, at 11:56 PM, Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip 
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 
> 2847 
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
> image 
> would not fit here either.

I see where the confusion may be coming from.

After formatting a floppy image using FreeDOS, it states:

1,474,560 bytes total disk space (disk size)
1,456,664 bytes available on disk (free clusters)

It would appear that the number 1457664 is the usable empty free space on the 
disk once it has been low level formatted and then formatted with the standard 
DOS file system. So, you probably do have a correct sized floppy diskette. 
However, you will need to use the appropriate tool to place the floppy image 
file onto the diskette. Other messages in this thread mention programs like 
rawrite & dd. These all work very well for this task.

Jerome 
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
Thanks. I'll try diskcopy.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Rugxulo
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2017 12:49 AM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 
> 2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
> image
> would not fit here either.

I downloaded the above (FD12FLOPPY.zip) and two of my own images
(BARE_DOS and MetaDOS). All of them have the same size (1474560). A
simple "file *.img" tells me that they all have 2880 sectors. I've
written a few real floppies in recent years with some of these and had
no obvious problems.

The obvious tool to use, among a million others variations, would be DISKCOPY:

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/diskcopy.htm

(Here's some alternatives.)

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35297505/

> -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
> words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

So, just for completeness, (direct or indirect) links to a bunch of
(Free)DOS floppy images are found below here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35557316/

Keep in mind that a 1.44 MB floppy doesn't hold many files (e.g. a
full FD "BASE" won't fit) and isn't actively used by most users
anymore (even in FreeDOS circles). Heck, floppies aren't even made
anymore, and most modern x86 machines lack the drives (although you
can probably still buy a USB floppy drive like I did). Thus it's
somewhat ignored in favor of newer, more popular media. So there is no
"full" install via floppy, thus you must figure things out manually
(for the most part). Networking (using a working packet driver) helps
tremendously. Otherwise you're stuck with copying manually
(sneakernet).

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
  I was just trying to simply copy it. I get an insufficient space message. Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.From: perditi...@gmail.comSent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 11:15 PMTo: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.netReply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a diskOn Mar 23, 2017 9:32 PM, "Dennis Fenton" <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for...
To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
1.44 floppyWhat program are you using to write the image to your floppy?   Boot images cannot be copied using copy, they must be written with a program like rawwrite or dd.  Does it give an explicit error code or just a message about insufficient space?Thank you,Jeremy


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Dennis Fenton
Exactly

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Felix Miata
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 10:56 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip 
"boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 2847 
512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
image 
would not fit here either.
-- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Jerome Shidel

> On Mar 23, 2017, at 11:56 PM, Felix Miata  wrote:
> 
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip 
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 
> 2847 
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
> image 
> would not fit here either.

I see where the confusion may be coming from.

After formatting a floppy image using FreeDOS, it states:

1,474,560 bytes total disk space (disk size)
1,456,664 bytes available on disk (free clusters)

It would appear that the number 1457664 is the usable empty free space on the 
disk once it has been low level formatted and then formatted with the standard 
DOS file system. So, you probably do have a correct sized floppy diskette. 
However, you will need to use the appropriate tool to place the floppy image 
file onto the diskette. Other messages in this thread mention programs like 
rawrite & dd. These all work very well for this task.

Jerome 
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-24 Thread Jerome Shidel
A 1.44MB 3.5” DS HD floppy disk is 1,474,560 bytes when formatted. (2MB 
unformatted)

It used 512 byte sectors, 18 sectors per track, 80 tracks per side and is/was a 
two sided media.

512 * 18 * 80 * 2 = 1474560 / 1024 = 1.44MB floppy.

More information on this can be found at 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats

Also, on Mac, Unix and Linux dd will write the disk image fine with a command 
like:

sudo dd if=FD12FLOPPY.img of=/dev/fd0

(or similar)

As a side note, PC-DOS 7 used oddly formatted diskettes for its install media. 
These provided a capacity lager than 1.44MB on its 3.5” install media. This was 
good to reduce the number of diskettes required. But, it made it more difficult 
to clone the original floppy disks for backup purposes. Also, it was not 100% 
compatible with all floppy drives and could cause other headaches as well.

Jerome
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Felix Miata  wrote:
>
> I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip
> "boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 
> 2847
> 512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
> image
> would not fit here either.

I downloaded the above (FD12FLOPPY.zip) and two of my own images
(BARE_DOS and MetaDOS). All of them have the same size (1474560). A
simple "file *.img" tells me that they all have 2880 sectors. I've
written a few real floppies in recent years with some of these and had
no obvious problems.

The obvious tool to use, among a million others variations, would be DISKCOPY:

http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/base/diskcopy.htm

(Here's some alternatives.)

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35297505/

> -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
> words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

So, just for completeness, (direct or indirect) links to a bunch of
(Free)DOS floppy images are found below here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/35557316/

Keep in mind that a 1.44 MB floppy doesn't hold many files (e.g. a
full FD "BASE" won't fit) and isn't actively used by most users
anymore (even in FreeDOS circles). Heck, floppies aren't even made
anymore, and most modern x86 machines lack the drives (although you
can probably still buy a USB floppy drive like I did). Thus it's
somewhat ignored in favor of newer, more popular media. So there is no
"full" install via floppy, thus you must figure things out manually
(for the most part). Networking (using a working packet driver) helps
tremendously. Otherwise you're stuck with copying manually
(sneakernet).

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Gregg Eshelman
It is possible to format a floppy a bit over size. Most drives will accommodate 
2 to 4 extra tracks. Depending on the drive and the controller it's possible to 
alter the number of sectors per track, but all tracks must have the same number 
of sectors. Typically, altering the number of sectors renders the format 
non-bootable.

Schenk & Horn CopyStar is one such program. It's old, originally from 1994, but 
it's known to work on Windows 2000, Server 2003 and older. I've not tried it on 
XP and later. Probably not compatible with 64 bit Windows. 
http://www.programfiles.com/Default.asp?LinkId=13681

Microsoft used an over-capacity format they called DMF. For programs (like 
Windows 95) where the first disk had to be bootable it was standard 1.44M.
IBM used a different over-capacity format for OS/2's install disks, but nothing 
included with OS/2 could write data to the disks, despite the inclusion of a 
utility to create blank disks with that format. (The largest all floppy install 
I ever did was OS/2 Warp 3.0, followed by a couple of large updates.)

If only the entire OEM computer industry had wholeheartedly adopted the 2.88M 
floppy, instead of only IBM and Compaq sorta halfway supporting it. "Hey look! 
We're making 2.88M floppy drives standard on ALL our computers! How about YOU, 
Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, Gateway 2000... *Apple*? You wanna fall behind 
us? Keep using that obsolete 1.44M!"

  From: Felix Miata <mrma...@earthlink.net>
 To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net 
 Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:57 PM
 Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk
   
I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip 
"boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 2847 
512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
image 
would not fit here either.
-- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread perditionc
On Mar 23, 2017 9:32 PM, "Dennis Fenton"  wrote:

After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
...
To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
1.44 floppy.
...


What program are you using to write the image to your floppy?   Boot images
cannot be copied using copy, they must be written with a program like
rawwrite or dd.  Does it give an explicit error code or just a message
about insufficient space?

Thank you,
Jeremy
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Felix Miata
I just looked inside http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip 
"boot floppy", and a 3.5" 1.44M floppy. My floppy has 1457664 total bytes, 2847 
512 byte sectors. The image downloaded is 1474560 bytes, so the downloaded 
image 
would not fit here either.
-- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

   Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a dis

2017-03-23 Thread Dennis Fenton
Yes that is the file. I also found it on the FreeDOS download page. I'm not 
familiar with grub4dos. I'll look into it.
Dennis

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Thomas Mueller
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 10:19 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a dis

from Dennis Fenton:

> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.
> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?

Is this the floppy image?

http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip

I just found it on FreeDOS download page.

But if too big to fit on 1.44 floppy, could you boot the image with grub4dos 
(latest and final version is 0.4.4)?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

I have booted "floppy" images far too big to fit on actual floppy.

Otherwise, you could possibly use Syslinux (latest version 6.03) with memdisk, 
or possibly Grub2.

Tom‎


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Dennis Fenton
No bad sectors. I tried two different freshly formatted disks and ran scandisk 
on them just to be sure.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: Felix Miata
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 10:30 PM
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

Dennis Fenton composed on 2017-03-23 20:32 (UTC-0500):

> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.

How much "too big"? Is it because your floppy has bad sectors. Floppies without 
bad sectors are rather uncommon around here. For this reason I try to avoid 
image writes, which demand all sectors in the media's spec be usable, and a 
format that worked once may well be that last the media will accept without 
error.

> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Felix Miata
Dennis Fenton composed on 2017-03-23 20:32 (UTC-0500):

> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.

How much "too big"? Is it because your floppy has bad sectors. Floppies without 
bad sectors are rather uncommon around here. For this reason I try to avoid 
image writes, which demand all sectors in the media's spec be usable, and a 
format that worked once may well be that last the media will accept without 
error.

> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a dis

2017-03-23 Thread Thomas Mueller
from Dennis Fenton:

> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.
> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?

Is this the floppy image?

http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip

I just found it on FreeDOS download page.

But if too big to fit on 1.44 floppy, could you boot the image with grub4dos 
(latest and final version is 0.4.4)?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

I have booted "floppy" images far too big to fit on actual floppy.

Otherwise, you could possibly use Syslinux (latest version 6.03) with memdisk, 
or possibly Grub2.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Dennis Fenton
Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy img. 
It doesn't fit!
So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a 
dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network.
  Original Message  
From: dmccunney
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 9:26 PM
To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS.
Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
> SCSI CD drive.
> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
> 1.44 floppy.

The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be
installed on a CDROM.

If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from
floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to
boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD
you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See
the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 »"

See http://www.freedos.org/download/

> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
> Do you have a fix for this?

The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions
on the download page.
__
Dennis

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[Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk

2017-03-23 Thread Dennis Fenton
After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for
MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with.
I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot
floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external
SCSI CD drive.
To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a
1.44 floppy.
This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an
organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it
wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image?
Do you have a fix for this?

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[Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-27 Thread nospam
A floppy image will probably not be used a lot to write it on a real floppy 
today. I use it as a base to make bootable CDs according to the ElTorito 
standard. Or use it with Bochs to boot from that image.

The files on the floppy image will be enough of the FreeDOS distribution for 
most embedded applications too. I need just about half of the files on this 
bare_dos image for my applications to run. Kernel, command.com, himem.sys, 
keyboard and mouse driver plus editor, thats usually it.

Georg


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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-27 Thread Eric Auer

Hi :-)

 So, roughly speaking, the main (bootable) disk would be:
 
 KERNEL, FreeCOM, XMGR, JEMMEX, UIDE, CTMOUSE, DOSLFN, UNZIP16,
 7ZDECODE, EDIT, SYS, FDISK, FORMAT, DISKCOPY, FDXMS286, HDPMI16,
 CWSDPMI, DOS32A, CWSTUB, XCOPY, SHCDX33F, RDISK, 

That is at least a reasonable set of drivers :-) I do miss
FDAPM in the list (note to Aitor: Please fix the regression
bug which breaks idling in EDIT, it worked in 0.7 EDITs)
and think I would not need CWSTUB / 7ZDECODE, maybe also
not HDPMI / DOS32A, maybe add an UNTGZ or UNTAR/GZIP/BZIP2?

 I know you and Eric prefer BASE plus some stuff from UTIL

It takes only 2 floppies to have ALL base with most extra
files. Depending on how much extra, you zip/drop some docs.
You could have all base binaries on 1 floppy, but too bare.
So as in my old Brezel distro, 3 disks fit base+docs+extra.

Regards, Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-26 Thread Jim Hall
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:11 AM, nospam nos...@georgpotthast.de wrote:
 Rugxulo has made a single floppy FreeDOS image called BARE_DOS that works
 well:
 https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/

 Georg


FYI: I've also mirrored Rugxulo's BARE_DOS to
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/bare_dos/

I don't use a floppy drive anymore, so I can't say how well this
works. Georg thinks it works well. If others think this is a good
FreeDOS floppy mini-distro, I'll link to it from the Downloads page
on www.freedos.org.

-jh

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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-26 Thread Ricardus Vincente
On Wed, 2012-09-26 at 17:22 -0500, Jim Hall wrote:

 The boot image I found didn't have CDROM drivers, but added them. I
could just make an ISO of the floppies I ended up making, if you like.

 Rich...

 On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:11 AM, nospam nos...@georgpotthast.de wrote:
  Rugxulo has made a single floppy FreeDOS image called BARE_DOS that works
  well:
  https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/
 
  Georg
 
  
 FYI: I've also mirrored Rugxulo's BARE_DOS to
 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/bare_dos/
 
 I don't use a floppy drive anymore, so I can't say how well this
 works. Georg thinks it works well. If others think this is a good
 FreeDOS floppy mini-distro, I'll link to it from the Downloads page
 on www.freedos.org.
 
 -jh
 
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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-26 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 5:22 PM, Jim Hall jh...@freedos.org wrote:
 On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 1:11 AM, nospam nos...@georgpotthast.de wrote:

 Rugxulo has made a single floppy FreeDOS image called BARE_DOS that works
 well:
 https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/

 Georg

 FYI: I've also mirrored Rugxulo's BARE_DOS to
 http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/bare_dos/

Not sure why, esp. this much later, heh, but it's useful, I suppose.
(But like all things, it too could use an update, argh. And sources
could've been easier to grab, e.g. bundled, but that was back when I
was very disorganized. Yet another distraction. It had a list of URLs,
and 99% should be easy to find, but it's less than ideal, I admit.)

 I don't use a floppy drive anymore, so I can't say how well this
 works. Georg thinks it works well.

I have a USB floppy drive, but I haven't used it lately.

I dunno, seems pointless, very few care. Even if I bothered, honestly
things change too fast. It's just easier to update things upstream or
provide patches and let people roll their own than trying to update
binary images ten bazillion times.

 If others think this is a good
 FreeDOS floppy mini-distro, I'll link to it from the Downloads page
 on www.freedos.org.

Like I told Eric, the best way would be to make the smallest, most
useful boot disk possible with minimal dependencies and hopefully very
few things would become outdated. Then make everything else plain
.ZIPs that can be unzipped manually if someone wants more than bare
minimum.

So, roughly speaking, the main (bootable) disk would be:

KERNEL, FreeCOM, XMGR, JEMMEX, UIDE, CTMOUSE, DOSLFN, UNZIP16,
7ZDECODE, EDIT, SYS, FDISK, FORMAT, DISKCOPY, FDXMS286, HDPMI16,
CWSDPMI, DOS32A, CWSTUB, XCOPY, SHCDX33F, RDISK, 

I know you and Eric prefer BASE plus some stuff from UTIL, so
maybe that's more comprehensive. But I can't remember everything, so I
don't know what that would omit or how big it would be. But surely
something like KERNEL + COMMAND.COM is way too minimal. It should at
least be able to install to hard disk and copy its own disk.

It's just honestly a lot to think about. Maybe I'm overthinking it,
maybe I need to build QEMU for my Linux machine for testing (or use
one of the Win32 alpha builds I've seen online) for easier updating.
It's just somewhat exhausting, heh, esp. for someone like me who
always starts too many minor projects.;-)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-17 Thread nospam
Rugxulo has made a single floppy FreeDOS image called BARE_DOS that works 
well:
https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/

Georg 


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[Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Ricardus Vincente
 I have looked around the FreeDOS web page and can't find them. I am
looking to resurrect an old Zeos Pentium 90 that I have, but it won't
boot from CD (its not a BIOS option), and it has no OS on it right now,
so I am going to need to boot it from 3.5 floppy.

 Are there any official IMG files that I can create a boot floppy from?


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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Felix Miata
On 2012-09-16 15:56 (GMT-0400) Ricardus Vincente composed:

   I have looked around the FreeDOS web page and can't find them. I am
 looking to resurrect an old Zeos Pentium 90 that I have, but it won't
 boot from CD (its not a BIOS option), and it has no OS on it right now,
 so I am going to need to boot it from 3.5 floppy.

   Are there any official IMG files that I can create a boot floppy from?

The installation CD has a menu option to create a boot floppy that should 
work from a computer with working OM and floppy devices. The only machine I 
tried it on (core2duo) gave floppy drive failure messages every time, but 
succeeded in making a bootable floppy after booting freshly installed FreeDOS 
1.1. Maybe it would work for you.
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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Ricardus Vincente
wizardofg...@gmail.com wrote:

  I have looked around the FreeDOS web page and can't find them. I am
 looking to resurrect an old Zeos Pentium 90 that I have, but it won't
 boot from CD (its not a BIOS option), and it has no OS on it right now,
 so I am going to need to boot it from 3.5 floppy.

  Are there any official IMG files that I can create a boot floppy from?

No official floppy images, no, mostly because nobody uses them anymore.   :-(

You can probably? use something like Smart Boot Manager to boot from
CD, even if your BIOS doesn't support it, but I've not tried.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/pkgs/smbtmgrx.zip

Alternately, you can find any old DOS boot floppy, create a very
minimal install, then copy the .ISO (split up, of course) on other
floppies, then recombine it and mount it via SHSUCDHD. Then you could
presumably install from there. Probably easier to grab if you have
working network card (NIC) and packet driver (Crynwr).

P.S. You could try older floppy images of ODIN (one disk installer)
or similar, but these may be somewhat old and outdated (but better
than nothing, I suppose):

http://odin.fdos.org/
http://www.finnix.org/Balder
https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/BARE_DOS.ZIP?attredirects=0

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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Eric Auer

Hi Ricardus,

Am 16.09.2012 21:56, schrieb Ricardus Vincente:
  I have looked around the FreeDOS web page and can't find them. I am
 looking to resurrect an old Zeos Pentium 90 that I have, but it won't
 boot from CD (its not a BIOS option), and it has no OS on it right now,
 so I am going to need to boot it from 3.5 floppy.
 
  Are there any official IMG files that I can create a boot floppy from?

While it is not official, I really like the idea of
Rugxulo's RUFFIDEA distro. It packs most BASE programs

as listed here www.freedos.org/software/?cat=base and
dozens of other small, free, often open source, goodies
on just three floppy disks. The sources are on separate
downloads which are significantly larger, ca 5-8 MB for
each floppy image. Not totally up to date, Rugxulo will
be happy to post his wish-list, but definitely one of
the best things you can do with 3 floppies! :-) Maybe
somebody wants to help updating it?

https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/

The page also has a minimal one floppy boot floppy, in
style of the old (former?) fdos.org daily build disks.

From my own experience, the OLD FreeDOS 1.0 Brezel
floppy distro experiment, two disks is an appropriate
amount of space for all BASE binaries, basic docs as
the HTMLHELP (which works even while zipped) and some
small pile of other goodies. The third disk of Brezel
was just a big zip with the doc/ directory wrapped up.
As a German-friendly distro, Brezel also contained a
German HTMLHELP and FreeCOM and localization things.

If you were to omit all text files and maybe drop a
few lesser-used apps, you CAN manage with one floppy
of running FreeDOS where MS DOS took 3 install disks
and probably more when you installed to floppies :-)

But as said, between two and four disks of FreeDOS
are just so much more fun than doing with just one.

Best, Eric :-)



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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Ricardus Vincente
On Sun, 2012-09-16 at 22:39 +0200, Eric Auer wrote:

 Thanks!

 Wow. I imagined that it would be a little easier than this.

 While I understand that FreeDOS is a modern DOS not meant just for
older hardware, I thought that one of the purposes for FreeDOS was to
make older hardware relevant again. From the looks of it, I can't see
any reasonable way to get FreeDOS working on an old machine that has no
OS currently on it.

 Rich...

 Hi Ricardus,
 
 Am 16.09.2012 21:56, schrieb Ricardus Vincente:
   I have looked around the FreeDOS web page and can't find them. I am
  looking to resurrect an old Zeos Pentium 90 that I have, but it won't
  boot from CD (its not a BIOS option), and it has no OS on it right now,
  so I am going to need to boot it from 3.5 floppy.
  
   Are there any official IMG files that I can create a boot floppy from?
 
 While it is not official, I really like the idea of
 Rugxulo's RUFFIDEA distro. It packs most BASE programs
 
 as listed here www.freedos.org/software/?cat=base and
 dozens of other small, free, often open source, goodies
 on just three floppy disks. The sources are on separate
 downloads which are significantly larger, ca 5-8 MB for
 each floppy image. Not totally up to date, Rugxulo will
 be happy to post his wish-list, but definitely one of
 the best things you can do with 3 floppies! :-) Maybe
 somebody wants to help updating it?
 
 https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/
 
 The page also has a minimal one floppy boot floppy, in
 style of the old (former?) fdos.org daily build disks.
 
 From my own experience, the OLD FreeDOS 1.0 Brezel
 floppy distro experiment, two disks is an appropriate
 amount of space for all BASE binaries, basic docs as
 the HTMLHELP (which works even while zipped) and some
 small pile of other goodies. The third disk of Brezel
 was just a big zip with the doc/ directory wrapped up.
 As a German-friendly distro, Brezel also contained a
 German HTMLHELP and FreeCOM and localization things.
 
 If you were to omit all text files and maybe drop a
 few lesser-used apps, you CAN manage with one floppy
 of running FreeDOS where MS DOS took 3 install disks
 and probably more when you installed to floppies :-)
 
 But as said, between two and four disks of FreeDOS
 are just so much more fun than doing with just one.
 
 Best, Eric :-)
 
 
 
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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Ralf A. Quint
At 01:46 PM 9/16/2012, Ricardus Vincente wrote:
On Sun, 2012-09-16 at 22:39 +0200, Eric Auer wrote:

  Thanks!

  Wow. I imagined that it would be a little easier than this.

  While I understand that FreeDOS is a modern DOS not meant just for
older hardware, I thought that one of the purposes for FreeDOS was to
make older hardware relevant again. From the looks of it, I can't see
any reasonable way to get FreeDOS working on an old machine that has no
OS currently on it.

Just hang in there, not all people are just ignoring problems like this...

Ralf 


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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread lee jones
not sure if it helps but I made this bootdisk a while back;

http://spfiles.no-ip.org/dos_bootdisk.img

I use this with an emulator called PCE which emulates an old 8086 based PC.

ljones

On 9/16/12, Ralf A. Quint free...@gmx.net wrote:
 At 01:46 PM 9/16/2012, Ricardus Vincente wrote:
On Sun, 2012-09-16 at 22:39 +0200, Eric Auer wrote:

  Thanks!

  Wow. I imagined that it would be a little easier than this.

  While I understand that FreeDOS is a modern DOS not meant just for
older hardware, I thought that one of the purposes for FreeDOS was to
make older hardware relevant again. From the looks of it, I can't see
any reasonable way to get FreeDOS working on an old machine that has no
OS currently on it.

 Just hang in there, not all people are just ignoring problems like this...

 Ralf


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:)

SP

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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Jose Antonio Senna
Ricardus Vincente wizardofg...@gmail.com said:

 While I understand that FreeDOS is a modern DOS not meant just for
older hardware, I thought that one of the purposes for FreeDOS was to
make older hardware relevant again. From the looks of it, I can't see
any reasonable way to get FreeDOS working on an old machine that has no
OS currently on it.

 How are you going to write the image(s) to a floppy ?

 Regards
 JAS


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Re: [Freedos-user] Boot floppy image files

2012-09-16 Thread Ricardus Vincente
On Sun, 2012-09-16 at 23:59 +, Jose Antonio Senna wrote:


  While I understand that FreeDOS is a modern DOS not meant just for
 older hardware, I thought that one of the purposes for FreeDOS was to
 make older hardware relevant again. From the looks of it, I can't see
 any reasonable way to get FreeDOS working on an old machine that has no
 OS currently on it.
 
  How are you going to write the image(s) to a floppy ?
 
  Regards
  JAS

 I have several friends with USB 3.5 inch drives. So they will make me a
Floppy and mail it to me.

 So weird that I have to use Snail Mail to get a way to boot my old
pentium machine!

 BTW, I think these images will do:

http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/

 Rich...


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-19 Thread Rugxulo
Hi,

On 12/18/10, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote:
 On 2010/12/17 21:58 (GMT-0800) Thomas D. Dean composed:

 On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 00:19 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:

  I tried 'dd if=balder10.img of=/dev/fd0' but got output error.

 When you install FreeDOS from the CD, I seem to remember something about
 creating a bootable floppy?

 I tried that, but got errors there too, varying according to choice of
 drivers loaded at boot.

I don't know what to tell you. Most floppy images of FreeDOS are old
(Joris, ODIN, Balder, Lucho), even mine (Ruffidea). There aren't
enough volunteers to keep everything up to date anyways. And floppies
are a rare (dying) commodity these days, even USB drives. It would be
easy to make you a custom image, of course, but it depends on what you
need.

There hasn't been a proper floppy install since beta8 although one guy
did manage to split FD 1.0 into 88 (!) floppy images (see iBiblio for
a mirror), though I think the readme says four would be enough for
minimal. But 1.0 is too old (heh), IMHO, so you should manually copy
some stuff to latest / greatest.

IIRC, all you really need are these:

kernel.sys, command.com (bare minimum)
fdisk (xfdisk? spfdisk?), format, sys (to install)
uide, xmgr, rdisk (Jack's drivers)
fdapm, ctmouse, moresys, xgrep, nansi, doszip (niceties)
mode, display, ega*.cpx, keyb, keyb*.sys (i18n)
(decent text editor)

 http://www.linfo.org/freedos_floppy.html

 That helped. After continuing to get failures from dd, it made me think to
 try a different/third machine/floppy drive (running OS/2), and got rawrite
 to
 make a floppy that enabled me to boot and FORMAT C: /S.

You must be installing, otherwise this wouldn't be needed. You didn't
mention FDISK, though, so I assume you already had taken care of that.
To create a floppy, you can use diskcopy, rawrite, fdimage, sfx14436,
or who knows how many other tools.

 Chkdsk (0.9) isn't reporting filesystem type. Is that usual in FreeDOS?

Dunno, but most likely yes. There's a WHICHFAT tool somewhere, but I
can't find the URL. But any FDISK (or similar partition program)
should report what filesystem for you. Anyways, I was always told that
DOSFSCK (32-bit) was preferred over FreeDOS CHKDSK (16-bit) if at all
possible.

 My C:  is 243M, which I had expected to use FAT16B and have a smaller
 cluster size than 4096, but I guess I'm just rustier than expected on FAT 
 stuff,
 or am I?

4 kb is nothing, my P166 (600+ MB total partition size) is 16 kb,
which is annoying. But in hindsight, two partitions  512 MB would've
been smarter. (Too dumb/lazy to temporarily install a second hard
drive just to fix that.)

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 words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

Get ready for Christmas!   :-)

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[Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-17 Thread Felix Miata
Anyone know why there's no simple bootable floppy image available in the 
downloads section of http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, one that could 
format and/or sys C:?
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-17 Thread Mike Eriksen
On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 4:36 AM, Felix Miata mrma...@earthlink.net wrote:
 Anyone know why there's no simple bootable floppy image available in the
 downloads section of http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, one that could
 format and/or sys C:?

Really? What does the very first line of that page say?

Mike

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-17 Thread Felix Miata
On 2010/12/18 04:46 (GMT+0100) Mike Eriksen composed:

 Felix Miata wrote:

  Anyone know why there's no simple bootable floppy image available in the
  downloads section of http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, one that could
  format and/or sys C:?

 Really? What does the very first line of that page say?

We don't have an official single-disk FreeDOS available...

I tried 'dd if=balder10.img of=/dev/fd0' but got output error.
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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-17 Thread Thomas D. Dean
On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 00:19 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:
 On 2010/12/18 04:46 (GMT+0100) Mike Eriksen composed:
 
  Felix Miata wrote:
 
   Anyone know why there's no simple bootable floppy image available in the
   downloads section of http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, one that could
   format and/or sys C:?
 
  Really? What does the very first line of that page say?
 
 We don't have an official single-disk FreeDOS available...
 
 I tried 'dd if=balder10.img of=/dev/fd0' but got output error.
When you install FreeDOS from the CD, I seem to remember something about
creating a bootable floppy?

I think I tried that, but, don't remember the results.

http://www.linfo.org/freedos_floppy.html

tomdean


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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-17 Thread bwspos


On 12/18/2010 07:19 AM, Felix Miata wrote:
 On 2010/12/18 04:46 (GMT+0100) Mike Eriksen composed:

 Felix Miata wrote:
   Anyone know why there's no simple bootable floppy image available in the
   downloads section of http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, one that could
   format and/or sys C:?
 Really? What does the very first line of that page say?
 We don't have an official single-disk FreeDOS available...

 I tried 'dd if=balder10.img of=/dev/fd0' but got output error.
The above command works fine for me and creates a bootable 1.44MB 3.5 
floppy which includes the SYS  FORMAT commands

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Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy

2010-12-17 Thread Felix Miata
On 2010/12/17 21:58 (GMT-0800) Thomas D. Dean composed:

 On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 00:19 -0500, Felix Miata wrote:

  I tried 'dd if=balder10.img of=/dev/fd0' but got output error.

 When you install FreeDOS from the CD, I seem to remember something about
 creating a bootable floppy?

I tried that, but got errors there too, varying according to choice of 
drivers loaded at boot.

 http://www.linfo.org/freedos_floppy.html

That helped. After continuing to get failures from dd, it made me think to 
try a different/third machine/floppy drive (running OS/2), and got rawrite to 
make a floppy that enabled me to boot and FORMAT C: /S.

Chkdsk (0.9) isn't reporting filesystem type. Is that usual in FreeDOS? My C: 
is 243M, which I had expected to use FAT16B and have a smaller cluster size 
than 4096, but I guess I'm just rustier than expected on FAT stuff, or am I?
-- 
The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive. Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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