Re: [Freedos-user] USB Stick and Bios

[Liam Proven via Freedos-user]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2024 at 09:10, Thomas Cornelius Desi via Freedos-user
 wrote:
>
> Does anyone around know if BIOSes in general differentiate between »floppy 
> drive« or »hard disk« because of an existing MBR (or partition table) or not?

Interesting question.

Some (older) BIOSes do distinguish between USB hard disk, USB floppy,
and USB optical drive.

In normal DOS usage, floppies have no partition table, as I understand
it. The raw disk device has a filesystem.

Hard disks must have a partition table first, and the classic DOS MBR
means 4 primaries max, 1 of which can be an extended holding logical
drives.

I don't _think_ BIOSes decide on the basis of format; the device
detection stuff happens first.

Maybe on size? Superfloppies got up to about 120MB. I don't recall much bigger.

SCSI lets devices report if they are removable or not. I don't know if
USB does.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB Stick and Bios

[Thomas Cornelius Desi via Freedos-user]

add on: Should I limit partitioning for boot partitions on a usb stick for 
Booting FreeDos to 8 GB? (Or maybe only 512MB or 256MB which are all more than 
enough to hold the FreeDOS Kernel and OS progs?)

because: 

> The original BIOS real-mode INT 13h interface supports drives of sizes up to 
> about 8 GB

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INT_13H )

> On 31.01.2024, at 10:07, Thomas Cornelius Desi via Freedos-user 
>  wrote:
> 
> I would want to find out if there is any common ground regarding USB Stick 
> formatting and having access to a second USB Stick when booting FreeDOS from 
> a first USB Stick.
> 
> Does anyone around know if BIOSes in general differentiate between »floppy 
> drive« or »hard disk« because of an existing MBR (or partition table) or not? 
> 
> Or is this true?:
> 
>> It is also known that a BIOS can treat a 256MB USB drive as a floppy drive, 
>> but a 512MB USB drive (that contains IDENTICAL contents), as a hard drive 
>> (the BIOS interrogates the USB drive for it’s physical drive size and from 
>> the size returned it determines how it should map the drive)."
>> 
> 
> and / or this:
> 
>> Before a BIOS loads the data (code) from the first sector of a USB drive and 
>> runs that code, it has to decide how to ‘map’ that device to the standard 
>> int 13h BIOS call that all boot code uses.
> 
> 
>> If the BIOS decides that the USB device is a floppy device, the BIOS will 
>> respond to ‘floppy drive’ int 13h requests (i.e. DL=00). If the BIOS treats 
>> the device as a hard disk type, it will respond to ‘hard disk’ int 13h 
>> requests (DL=80h). If the BIOS treats the USB device as a ZIP device, it 
>> will respond to access requests as a floppy (DL=00) but it will translate 
>> any request such that a request for Sector 1 (LBA0) will return the PBR of 
>> the device, a request for Sector 2 will return the sector after the PBR and 
>> so on. Thus to any real-mode (DOS) OS, the USB ZIP device will appear to be 
>> just like a big floppy disk with no MBR or reserved sectors.
> 
> 
> (Quotes from:  
> https://rmprepusb.com/tutorials/027-diagnose-how-your-bios-boots-usb-drives/#google_vignette
>  )
> 
> Thanks if anyone has a knowledge of this info. Is it obsolete/outdated?
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 
> 
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[Freedos-user] USB Stick and Bios

[Thomas Cornelius Desi via Freedos-user]

I would want to find out if there is any common ground regarding USB Stick 
formatting and having access to a second USB Stick when booting FreeDOS from a 
first USB Stick.

Does anyone around know if BIOSes in general differentiate between »floppy 
drive« or »hard disk« because of an existing MBR (or partition table) or not? 

Or is this true?:

> It is also known that a BIOS can treat a 256MB USB drive as a floppy drive, 
> but a 512MB USB drive (that contains IDENTICAL contents), as a hard drive 
> (the BIOS interrogates the USB drive for it’s physical drive size and from 
> the size returned it determines how it should map the drive)."
>  

and / or this:

> Before a BIOS loads the data (code) from the first sector of a USB drive and 
> runs that code, it has to decide how to ‘map’ that device to the standard int 
> 13h BIOS call that all boot code uses.


> If the BIOS decides that the USB device is a floppy device, the BIOS will 
> respond to ‘floppy drive’ int 13h requests (i.e. DL=00). If the BIOS treats 
> the device as a hard disk type, it will respond to ‘hard disk’ int 13h 
> requests (DL=80h). If the BIOS treats the USB device as a ZIP device, it will 
> respond to access requests as a floppy (DL=00) but it will translate any 
> request such that a request for Sector 1 (LBA0) will return the PBR of the 
> device, a request for Sector 2 will return the sector after the PBR and so 
> on. Thus to any real-mode (DOS) OS, the USB ZIP device will appear to be just 
> like a big floppy disk with no MBR or reserved sectors.


(Quotes from:  
https://rmprepusb.com/tutorials/027-diagnose-how-your-bios-boots-usb-drives/#google_vignette
 )

Thanks if anyone has a knowledge of this info. Is it obsolete/outdated?

Thomas



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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox

[Bryan Kilgallin via Freedos-user]

Yes, Louis:


Very cool!


In my Ubuntu Home directory is the hidden directory ".dosbox".
And within that, is the latest-version configuration file
"dosbox-0.74-3.conf".
At the end of that, I have edited a section thus.
{[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# Belkin F5U409 Serial-USB interface.
serial1=directserial realport:ttyUSB0
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.
# Mount POLAR heart-monitor software directory. Change to it & run POLAR.
mount c ~/snap/dosbox-jz/108/DOS/POLAR/
C:
POLAR}

So now launching DOSBox, changes to the heart-monitor software 
directory. Then that application opens.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox

[Louis Santillan via Freedos-user]

Very cool!

On Tue, Jul 25, 2023 at 4:05 AM Bryan Kilgallin 
wrote:

> Yay, Louis:
>
> > It should be at `/dev/ttyUSB0` and you should refer to realport
> > `ttyUSB0` or something like that (`serial1=directserial
> > realport:ttyUSB0`).
>
> Yes, I found that character device.
>
> lsusb lists the following.
>
> {Bus 001 Device 005: ID 050d:0109 Belkin Components F5U109/F5U409 PDA
> Adapter}
>
> In DOSBox, at the C: prompt, I entered:
>   "serial1=directserial realport:ttyUSB0".
>
> Then I launched the POLAR software. and told the heart-monitor to
> transmit. The POLAR software immediately received the data!
> --
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>
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox

[Bryan Kilgallin via Freedos-user]

Yay, Louis:

It should be at `/dev/ttyUSB0` and you should refer to realport 
`ttyUSB0` or something like that (`serial1=directserial 
realport:ttyUSB0`).


Yes, I found that character device.

lsusb lists the following.

{Bus 001 Device 005: ID 050d:0109 Belkin Components F5U109/F5U409 PDA 
Adapter}


In DOSBox, at the C: prompt, I entered:
 "serial1=directserial realport:ttyUSB0".

Then I launched the POLAR software. and told the heart-monitor to 
transmit. The POLAR software immediately received the data!

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox

[Louis Santillan via Freedos-user]

It should be at `/dev/ttyUSB0` and you should refer to realport `ttyUSB0`
or something like that (`serial1=directserial realport:ttyUSB0`).  This
article (
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/find-out-linux-serial-ports-with-setserial/)
gives a good example of how to manage serial ports (including USB
connected) in Ubuntu.

This article (https://www.scivision.dev/dosbox-linux-serial-port/) gives
additional tips on how to set up serial ports for DOSBox on Linux.

On Mon, Jul 24, 2023 at 6:32 PM Bryan Kilgallin via Freedos-user <
freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> My heart monitor is an old Polar Sport Tester 4000.
> https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1393035/Polar-Electro-Sport-Testert.html
>
> Its interface box has an RS2323 socket.
>
> I had been downloading data to an old PC with a serial port. That PC
> runs FreeDOS. VER/R reports "DOS version 7.10".
>
> My Ubuntu PC does not have a serial port.
>
> But I have a Belkin F5U409 USB-serial adaptor. My Linux kernel is
> 5.19.0-50-generic.
>
> {The device is supported by kernel versions 2.6.0 and newer according to
> the LKDDb:
>
> Ver Source  Config  By ID   By Class
> 2.6.0 - 6.3 drivers/usb/serial/mct_u232.c   CONFIG_USB
> CONFIG_USB_SERIAL
> CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_MCT_U232  050d:0109   *}
>
> https://linux-hardware.org/?id=usb:050d-0109
>
> That adaptor's LNK LED is on (green).
>
> The Ubuntu PC has DOSBox v0.74-3. It runs the POLAR software OK. That
> can set serial port to COM1 or COM2.
>
> DOSBox Wiki says this.
>
> {Configuration:SerialPort
> Jump to navigation
> Jump to search
>
> serialX = device [parameter:value]
>
>  device can be: dummy | modem | nullmodem | directserial
>  parameter is: irq
>  value is:
>
>  for directserial: realport (required), rxdelay (optional).
>  for modem: listenport (optional).
>  for nullmodem: server, rxdelay, txdelay, telnet, usedtr,
> transparent, port, inhsocket (all optional).
>
>  Defaults:
>  serial1=dummy
>  serial2=dummy
>  serial3=disabled
>  serial4=disabled
>
>  An example of how to configure an actual serial port for I/O use:
>
> serial1=directserial realport:com1}
>
> So in DOSBox, I enter that last line.
>
> Then I launch the POLAR software.
> And I check its default serial port:
> "THE SELECTED SERIAL PORT FOR HR INPUT IS: COM1".
>
> Then I instruct the heart monitor to transmit data. And the adapter's RX
> LED illuminates red. But the POLAR software fails to detect data!
>
> Please advise.
> --
> members.iinet.net.au/~kilgallin/
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox

[Eric Auer via Freedos-user]

Hi! Have you tried using dosemu2? They have active development and 
support, so even if it does not work out of the box, they should still 
be able to give you advice on how to make it work :-) Regards, Eric





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[Freedos-user] USB serial & DOSBox

[Bryan Kilgallin via Freedos-user]

My heart monitor is an old Polar Sport Tester 4000.
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/1393035/Polar-Electro-Sport-Testert.html

Its interface box has an RS2323 socket.

I had been downloading data to an old PC with a serial port. That PC 
runs FreeDOS. VER/R reports "DOS version 7.10".


My Ubuntu PC does not have a serial port.

But I have a Belkin F5U409 USB-serial adaptor. My Linux kernel is 
5.19.0-50-generic.


{The device is supported by kernel versions 2.6.0 and newer according to 
the LKDDb:


Ver Source  Config  By ID   By Class
2.6.0 - 6.3 	drivers/usb/serial/mct_u232.c 	CONFIG_USB CONFIG_USB_SERIAL 
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_MCT_U232 	050d:0109 	*}


https://linux-hardware.org/?id=usb:050d-0109

That adaptor's LNK LED is on (green).

The Ubuntu PC has DOSBox v0.74-3. It runs the POLAR software OK. That 
can set serial port to COM1 or COM2.


DOSBox Wiki says this.

{Configuration:SerialPort
Jump to navigation
Jump to search

serialX = device [parameter:value]

device can be: dummy | modem | nullmodem | directserial
parameter is: irq
value is:

for directserial: realport (required), rxdelay (optional).
for modem: listenport (optional).
for nullmodem: server, rxdelay, txdelay, telnet, usedtr, 
transparent, port, inhsocket (all optional).


Defaults:
serial1=dummy
serial2=dummy
serial3=disabled
serial4=disabled

An example of how to configure an actual serial port for I/O use:

serial1=directserial realport:com1}

So in DOSBox, I enter that last line.

Then I launch the POLAR software.
And I check its default serial port:
"THE SELECTED SERIAL PORT FOR HR INPUT IS: COM1".

Then I instruct the heart monitor to transmit data. And the adapter's RX 
LED illuminates red. But the POLAR software fails to detect data!


Please advise.
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial port

[Frantisek Rysanek]

On 6 Jan 2021 at 11:23, Tomas By wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Is there a way to get a USB serial port adapter to work?
> 

This cannot be made to work for legacy software that accesses the 
UART registers directly, hooks an IRQ etc. 
USB is a whole different bus architecture, compared to legacy ISA.

The following driver *might* be a way for software that can work with 
a DOS "device" abstraction.

Or, if you actually have source code of the DOS program, that needs 
to work with the USB COM port, you have a chance to modify your 
software to use the DOS device abstraction:

http://www.dosusb.net/dosusb.pdf

Note that USB/serial has no standard USB class (except maybe for 
ACM/CDC, which is not very popular among USB/serial dongles).
The serdrv.sys as part of dosusb only supports USB/serial UARTs by 
Prolific.

Open-source code examples are available in the wild interwebs, for a 
few popular serial/USB UART chip models for Linux (stock kernel 
drivers) and Android (user space libraries) - supporting brands such 
as Prolific, FTDI or Silicon Labs.

The DOSUSB driver also provides a generic URB interface, which 
theoretically would allow you to write your own "USB/serial driver"
= routines for your particular USB/serial chip.

All in all I don't think this is what you were asking for :-)

Frank


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB serial port

[Bryan Kilgallin]

Tomas:


Is there a way to get a USB serial port adapter to work?


No.


The mode command says there is no serial port (the usb adapter was
there before booting), and the machine does not have a RS232 port.


That is why I moved my DOS usage to an old 32 bit tower PC that has a 
physical serial port!

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[Freedos-user] USB serial port

[Tomas By]

Hi all,

Is there a way to get a USB serial port adapter to work?

The mode command says there is no serial port (the usb adapter was
there before booting), and the machine does not have a RS232 port.

/Tomas


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB Floppy

[Ralf Quint]

On 11/15/2020 6:27 AM, Marv wrote:
I was under the impression an external USB floppy wouldn't work under 
FreeDOS 1.3, but I just noticed my installation of FreeDOS 1.3 on a 
circa 2011 Gateway laptop with an external USB Chuanganzhuo floppy 
does work.


I'm not sure what driver FreeDOS is using on the Gateway, but if I 
plug the floppy into my HP Windows 10 laptop, it says it's a TEAC USB 
UF1000x USB device using a default Windows sfloppy.sys driver. It was 
plug-n-play. I didn't install any drivers on either laptop.


I didn't buy this floppy drive for FreeDOS. My main FreeDOS machine 
has a builtin floppy drive. I bought it to read some old floppies on 
my HP Windows 10 laptop.


I am using USB floppy drives to exchange data between my Windows PC(s) 
and my FreeDOS box(es). They work just fine on all of my DOS machine as 
long as it floppy drive is connected when the machine is turned on. The 
BIOS of all machines in this case (2x Dell, 1x Compaq) just presents it 
as a standard 3.5" floppy drive. Hot swap of course doesn't work, but 
that hasn't really bothered me at all so far...


Ralf



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Re: [Freedos-user] USB Floppy

[Eric Auer]

Hi Marv,

> I'm not sure what driver FreeDOS is using on the Gateway, but if I plug the
> floppy into my HP Windows 10 laptop, it says it's a TEAC USB UF1000x USB

FreeDOS does not use any USB driver by default, as far as I know.

So you probably have USB storage device support in your BIOS and
FreeDOS simply enjoys using the BIOS disk :-) In particular after
booting from it, or when having it already connected during boot.

Note that sizes other than 1.44 MB or low level formatting might
not be working in your BIOS USB floppy support, but you can try.

Regards, Eric



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[Freedos-user] USB Floppy

[Marv]

I was under the impression an external USB floppy wouldn't work under
FreeDOS 1.3, but I just noticed my installation of FreeDOS 1.3 on a circa
2011 Gateway laptop with an external USB Chuanganzhuo floppy does work.

I'm not sure what driver FreeDOS is using on the Gateway, but if I plug the
floppy into my HP Windows 10 laptop, it says it's a TEAC USB UF1000x USB
device using a default Windows sfloppy.sys driver. It was plug-n-play. I
didn't install any drivers on either laptop.

I didn't buy this floppy drive for FreeDOS. My main FreeDOS machine has a
builtin floppy drive. I bought it to read some old floppies on my HP
Windows 10 laptop.

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[Freedos-user] usb problem

[haytam.fr--- via Freedos-user]

freedos1.3 rc 3, full USB , full installation,
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[Freedos-user] USB to 34 pin floppy adapter...

[michael]

The bios supports a USB floppy drive and purportedly it will work in MS-DOS... 
I've got an adapter coming Monday and will give it a shot under Freedos and XP.

I can theoretically if XP will remap the Atapi Zip as A: replace floppies with 
a zip disk. Can I create an image file in XP and map that as A:? I'm not 
talking an emulated environment like VirtualBox, just a software floppy so to 
speak where the image file is on the SSD/hard drive? Then I should be able to 
rawrite it to a zip
disk perhaps. It will be overkill on space, but 100 mb zip disks are cheap and 
50mb zip disks are impossible to find.
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...

[michael]

>> I bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX.
 
Q-Soft for the Tyco QSP-2 installs to MS-DOS 5.22 and is a real time system on
the DOS side.  It installs via actual floppy disk.  If you are running the GUI
computer (Windows 9x) on say QEMU and emulating the floppy...  but that would 
involve reengineering the system.  The real time system for example uses ISA 
heavily.  There are PCI variants of many of the cards where four ISA cards are 
replaced by say one PCI card, but that would involve reengineering of a 20 year
old system.

> Which reasons do you have to use MS DOS instead of FreeDOS?
> Reasons to use FreeDOS could be to have more free RAM and
> the FAT32 support. You can use most FreeDOS drivers together
> with MS DOS if you like, too.

Q-Soft is available as an executable designed to run on MS-DOS 6.22.  May 
work just fine in Freedos, may not, have not been able to try it because 
of floppy disk issue.

> Floppy drives do not break easily and most have the same
> geometry and interface, so finding one might be easier
> than finding any supply of still working disks for them.

Understood, but I'm pretty sure my Teac USB floppy drive has
failed.  I fished a disk cover that came off out of it and
there could be a smaller part loose still inside the drive.  
The drive simply does not work now.  I doubt that disks that
are generally new are suddently all bad let alone that sector
0 is magically unwritable on all of my disks.
 
> Regarding your security concerns, you are right that flash
> chips make it hard to securely wipe data due to built-in
> distribution of writes to load-balance. You could avoid
> the problem by having only encrypted files on the portable
> drive. Then destroying the key effectively zaps the data.
> DOS versions of infozip at least support some encryption
> and you can use other tools such as 7zip for DOS as well.

If I run Linux and KVM I can emulate the floppy on a flash 
drive.  Sadly, that won't work well on an old Pentium 4 where
it would work much better on say a modern i7.  Going from PICMG 
1.0 though to PICMG 1.3, forget about the ISA shared memory 
card.  The real time system which is ISA only would have to be
completely reconsidered.  A Tyco QSP-2 is a 20 year old system
now that depends on MS-DOS and Windows 98SE or Windows ME.  You 
don't just replace the two computer heads with one without a lot 
of reengineering.  PPM owns the system now and has reengineered
it around Windows 7 and possibly Windows 10...  different 
system with different bugs.  Considering that this is a $30k
plus piece of equipment for placing small electronic components
on a circuit board, surface mount packaging, fixing the old
system makes more sense than switching to the newer variant.
You can't just upgrade the heads either as computers have 
changed so much in twenty years.  Most people don't even know
what a floppy drive is anymore.

For the color computer 3 there is a floppy replacement that uses a 
2GB flash memory card and stores 360k images on it.  That device 
could be adapted I bet to work with an SBC that has a floppy 
controller.  No emulation needed, direct hardware replacement.
As far as DOS is concerned, that is a floppy disk in a floppy
drive.  In reality, it's flash memory holding multiple disks.
 
> Eric
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Oh, the EVOC board lacks a floppy header.  It has 3 USB 2.0 channels
and of course it expects you to plug in a USB floppy drive if you need
one.  Sadly, I don't think Freedos 1.3 RC2 can use a USB floppy drive even
on an EVOC supported through some weird AMI BIOS.  I tried an ISA multi
I/O plus floppy card, but without BIOS support for it I don't think that
will work either.  I currently have the disable jumper set for the floppy
controller.  If only I could get the source code for the AMI BIOS on this
thing and add support for the ISA floppy controller...


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...

[Eric Auer]

Hi Michael,

> I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane.

That sounds exotic, but still your BIOS has a menu item
where you can enable an on-board hardware floppy controller.
Do you imply that there is no header on the board to plug
a classic floppy to that classic controller?

> I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification

Correct, but often the BIOS supports storage USB media.
In older BIOS, this only works if you boot from the
medium in question, such as a flash drive / USB stick,
but it is clearly better than nothing. USB flash sticks
are usually supported better than USB floppy by BIOS!

There also are very few USB drivers for DOS which you
can load after booting if your BIOS lacks support. In
general, those also are better with USB sticks or USB
harddisks than with USB floppy. So the question would
be why you prefer floppy over other media?

I actually have booted DOS and started Windows 3 from
USB stick many years ago. It was horribly slow but the
BIOS already had the feature :-)

> Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin
> floppy output for legacy 1.44 m floppy drives...

You mean an USB case / housing for classic floppy? That
is how most USB cases work, also for IDE and SATA disks.

> Why not emulate a floppy drive if desired as well?

Well, why yes? Other media have so much more capacity.

> I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector.

Your problem is that your mainboard has no floppy connector
if I understand you correctly. So you need a CF to USB and
not a CF to 34 pin. The name for CF to USB is cardreader ;-)

> DOS if I'm not mistaken expects the floppy support to be in the BIOS.

Usually yes. That means you can also simulate floppy using
anything which takes over from the BIOS. The famous memdisk
(often used with GRUB and similar boot menus) does exactly
that: Put a floppy disk image on your boot medium (harddisk,
USB, CD, DVD, many types supported) and load memdisk. This
pretends that the floppy image is an actual BIOS floppy disk
and boots it :-)

> The advantage of floppies is they are easily destroyed.
> 
> Try destroying a USB flash key

How about breaking the silicon chips into pieces? Silicon is
very brittle. You can also use high voltage to break things.

> with Linux and Microsoft moving away from floppies, should
> Freedos support emulated floppies?

See above, there already is memdisk for that. Note that it
does not usually write changes back to disk, but if you want
persistent storage, you can just use any normal disk anyway.

About your ATAPI ZIP question: I think some BIOSes support
booting from that and using that as well. They are a bit
weird because they mix floppy use style and harddisk size.
DOS might treat them as normal harddisk and get confused
when you try to swap disks.

> bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX.

Which reasons do you have to use MS DOS instead of FreeDOS?
Reasons to use FreeDOS could be to have more free RAM and
the FAT32 support. You can use most FreeDOS drivers together
with MS DOS if you like, too.

Floppy drives do not break easily and most have the same
geometry and interface, so finding one might be easier
than finding any supply of still working disks for them.

Regarding your security concerns, you are right that flash
chips make it hard to securely wipe data due to built-in
distribution of writes to load-balance. You could avoid
the problem by having only encrypted files on the portable
drive. Then destroying the key effectively zaps the data.
DOS versions of infozip at least support some encryption
and you can use other tools such as 7zip for DOS as well.

Eric



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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...

[tom ehlert]

> I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane.

> I have not been able to get floppy disk support in Freedos 1.3, period.

as far as I understand it, you have been working with MSDOS 6.x for
the last 25 years.

I recommend another 20 years.


the alternative would have been to

a) send the hardware to my home adress, with exact and complete
description of symptoms and wanted outcome, and ~5000USD attached. no
warranties, unfortunately.


> I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification that freedos is
> targeting, but a USB floppy driver is needed since that is what this 
> particular SBC offers.

> I'm wondering if freedos could be reasonably modified to support a USB floppy 
> drive as A drive?

> Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin floppy
> output for legacy 1.44 m floppy drives... Why not emulate a floppy drive if 
> desired as well?
> I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector.

Yep. Sure. great idea, but not entirely new. IIRC that was ~5000 EUR
per adapter. in ~2007.

Tom



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[Freedos-user] USB floppy saga...

[michael]

I'm working with an EVOC brand SBC on a PICMG 1.0 backplane.

I have not been able to get floppy disk support in Freedos 1.3, period.

I know USB 1.1 isn't part of the DOS specification that freedos is targeting, 
but a USB floppy driver is needed since that is what this particular SBC offers.

I'm wondering if freedos could be reasonably modified to support a USB floppy 
drive as A drive?

Another thought, if building a USB device with a 34 pin floppy output for 
legacy 1.44 m floppy drives... Why not emulate a floppy drive if desired as 
well?
I'm thinking a CF to usb adapter with a 34 pin floppy connector. Another 
option, MicroSD card like the ones used on the Raspberry Pi.

DOS if I'm not mistaken expects the floppy support to be in the BIOS. It also 
expects IRQ 6, DMA 2, I/O address something...

The advantage of floppies is they are easily destroyed.

Try destroying a USB flash key, they are more resilient than floppies and much 
higher capacity, but they are NOT easily destroyed.

What I'm asking is with Linux and Microsoft moving away from floppies, should 
Freedos support emulated floppies?

If say you are connecting via USB 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.1 that is different than 
what traditional DOS expects. Modern PCs lack the traditional floppy 
controller. 
Can freedos be tweaked to work around the no floppy controller issue in a 
compatible fashion? I'm thinking ATAPI devices such as Zip drives can be a 
floppy replacement, but can they be pointed to as the A: drive? I have a Zip 
750 Atapi drive coming tomorrow and 3 sealed 750 meg zip disks.

Atapi zip drives work in Windows XP and Windows 9x, but they don't work in 
MS-DOS and they don't work in Freedos unless I'm mistaken.

I may be stuck with MS-DOS 6.2 for the real time system that the Tyco QSP-2 
uses. I bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX.
Haven't had a chance to test the real time system on freedos because I don't 
have floppy support unless the SBC in question that I'm testing with has a real
floppy controller and a real 1.44M floppy drive in working condition is 
available.

I'm not an EE, but I know someone who is and I would like to contribute an open 
hardware and driver specification for a floppy replacement that is compatible 
with MSDOS, Freedos, Linux, Windows...

Magnetic media is easily disposed of, but it less than reliable in many cases 
and the capacities tend to be low. Something modern that is higher capacity and 
that
can replace what came before is needed. Something that is easily destroyed like 
floppies but readily available and higher capacity. CD-R media is great, but it 
isn't
as rewriteable as floppies. I'll be testing my Zip750 disks to see how 
destructible and how reliable they are and I'll be looking to see if I can 
replace A: with them.

As far as using a USB floppy drive, I think I broke mine. Even so, I don't 
think freedos is able to use USB devices let alone floppy replacements.
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB & dos

[Dale E Sterner]

To make copies I use Ghost 2001 and the famous Panasonic dos usb driver.
You should be able to boot up with the floppy and copy to usb flash.
Later versions of Ghost were big duds. Copied 32 gigs yesterday;
took 5 hours. Plan for a long coffee break.


cheers
DS


On Wed, 08 May 2019 15:04:49 + mich...@robinson-west.com writes:
> The standard rescue disk for Norton Ghost is PC-DOS based.  I have 
> developed a Freedos alternative
> boot disk and I'm asking about the video card because of suggestions 
> that freedos cannot support
> restoring a ghost image to a usb hard drive.  Linux has been 
> suggested by Eric because of the lack
> of USB hard drive support in FreeDOS and it looks like I need a dos 
> based bootloader that can 
> chainload Windows 2000.  The intel video card and touchscreen 
> require the panel.exe driver in 
> Freedos to work.
> 
> As far as Windows 2000 support, Windows 2000 isn't supported by 
> Microsoft and if there was a free alternative
> that is a drop in replacement I'd try it.  ReactOS in theory would 
> work, but it's still in alpha and not meant
> for everyday use.
> 
> May 8, 2019 9:36 AM, "Tom Ehlert"  wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> >> The Agilent e5061a belongs to the company I'm working for and is
> >> only two channel. 
> > 
> > this mailing list is about FreeDOS, and not the Agilent e5061a or
> > Windows 2000 support group.
> > 
> > you may help him, but please do so on private channels; the 
> FreeDOS
> > community is not going to learn anything out of this discussion.
> > 
> > thanks
> > Tom
> > 
> > ___
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> 
> 
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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB Issue

[Louis Santillan]

I believe Coyote is referring to a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 (
http://www.tabletpcreview.com/tabletreview/panasonic-cf-18-toughbook-tablet-pc-review-pics-specs/
).

On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 10:06 PM Coyote Slinger 
wrote:

> Pentium M 1.10GHz
> 512MB RAM
> Phoenix BIOS
>
> I will give that a try, thank you. I'm just confused as it was working
> so well just yesterday.
>
>
> On 12/26/18, Rugxulo  wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 4:36 PM Coyote Slinger 
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I recently reinstalled FreeDOS on my CF-18 after my tinkering broke my
> >> old install.
> >>
> >> I have a USB 2.0 drive that is formatted to FAT16 and 256MB. It mounts
> to
> >> D:\
> >>
> >> After running any command accessing D:\ such as dir or move, the
> >> computer freezes and does not redisplay the D:\ or C:\ prompt.
> >> Ctrl+Alt+Del is needed to reboot the computer, all other key presses
> >> result in the beep command tone. On reboot, copy and move commands,
> >> have just created the basic file label, with 0 bytes as size.
> >
> > What cpu? (Skylake?) How much RAM? (8 GB?) What BIOS vendor?
> > (Phoenix?) Oh, and totally avoid / unload JEMMEX (or JEMM386) from
> > AUTOEXEC. Prefer XMS only (e.g. HIMEMX) instead! In fact, unload all
> > other unnecessary drivers.
> >
> > Try a different install, e.g. this (somewhat minimalist and pathetic,
> > but see if it has the same symptoms):
> >
> > *
> >
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/metados-0.6-on-64mb-jump-drive.zip
> >
> >
> > ___
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>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB Issue

[Coyote Slinger]

Pentium M 1.10GHz
512MB RAM
Phoenix BIOS

I will give that a try, thank you. I'm just confused as it was working
so well just yesterday.


On 12/26/18, Rugxulo  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 4:36 PM Coyote Slinger 
> wrote:
>>
>> I recently reinstalled FreeDOS on my CF-18 after my tinkering broke my
>> old install.
>>
>> I have a USB 2.0 drive that is formatted to FAT16 and 256MB. It mounts to
>> D:\
>>
>> After running any command accessing D:\ such as dir or move, the
>> computer freezes and does not redisplay the D:\ or C:\ prompt.
>> Ctrl+Alt+Del is needed to reboot the computer, all other key presses
>> result in the beep command tone. On reboot, copy and move commands,
>> have just created the basic file label, with 0 bytes as size.
>
> What cpu? (Skylake?) How much RAM? (8 GB?) What BIOS vendor?
> (Phoenix?) Oh, and totally avoid / unload JEMMEX (or JEMM386) from
> AUTOEXEC. Prefer XMS only (e.g. HIMEMX) instead! In fact, unload all
> other unnecessary drivers.
>
> Try a different install, e.g. this (somewhat minimalist and pathetic,
> but see if it has the same symptoms):
>
> *
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/metados-0.6-on-64mb-jump-drive.zip
>
>
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[Freedos-user] USB Issue

[Coyote Slinger]

Hello everyone.

I recently reinstalled FreeDOS on my CF-18 after my tinkering broke my
old install. I had no issues with USB on that. However on my most
recent install, using a USB stick seems to freeze and the system. I
have tried all four boot options to the same result.

I have a USB 2.0 drive that is formatted to FAT16 and 256MB. It mounts to D:\

After running any command accessing D:\ such as dir or move, the
computer freezes and does not redisplay the D:\ or C:\ prompt.
Ctrl+Alt+Del is needed to reboot the computer, all other key presses
result in the beep command tone. On reboot, copy and move commands,
have just created the basic file label, with 0 bytes as size.

Help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB printer support and drivers

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 11:31 PM Tom Schultz  wrote:
>
> I have version 1.2-pre22 installed and help mentioned future support for 
> local printers prn and lpt1.

I think that was more wishful dreaming, being idealistic, than any
actual plans by anyone.

* http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Printer

> Will there be support for USB printers? My computer doesn't have a parallel 
> port, but I have used USB jump drive and USB floppy drive successfully.

Unlikely ... although stranger things have happened.

You're more likely to get something working in VDosPlus (or whatever
other emulator) atop other "modern" OS than get native DOS driver
support.

* http://vdosplus.org/
* https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=4=68001

Although there's also Bret Johnson's USB (UHCI only) drivers, which
may have some limited printer support. I've not tested it, but that
may be helpful in some cases:

* http://www.bretjohnson.us/

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[Freedos-user] USB printer support and drivers

[Tom Schultz]

I have version 1.2-pre22 installed and help mentioned future support for
local printers prn and lpt1. Will there be support for USB printers? My
computer doesn't have a parallel port, but I have used USB jump drive and
USB floppy drive successfully. Thanks. TomS.
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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Kevin McCormick]

> Honestly, I don't understand the need for Win98SE (MS-DOS 7.1) here.
I did not mean to imply that Win98SE was definitely required, just that
I used it in the attempt that ultimately was successful.  I likely had
this problem solved a few times without realizing it, since I made
numerous bootable freedos usb sticks.  They did not work in my bios
upgrade attempts, but they may very well have worked if I had correctly
guessed the right steps.   I have not seen a DOS prompt in several years
and I was worried about the boot menu because I expected the bios update
to be unable to handle dealing with a menu.  I was looking for a boot
straight into the C: prompt, then I realized the A: prompt was more
likely, and then realized the C: prompt would be the usb file system
root.  Then I decided just to try running the .exe file before buying a
new mobo.  In the documents you found there are two files discussed, one
of which is a bios.bin, which probably would have worked.  That was not
the case with the MSI download for my situation -- everything was
contained in the .exe file.

My personal opinion is that after repeatedly warning that a bios upgrade
can ruin your computer, there should be some effort to have directions
that match the process, but that is just me.  The whole thing was a
learning experience, which I may never use again.

It may be of interest to the FreeDOS community that the "M-Flash"
process required a UEFI boot setup on the DOS usb stick, which seems to
be a bit incongruous  (not if UEFI is really about selling more
product).  However, it was happy to use my non-uefi stick when it found
a bios.bin file, which was the old bios I backed up onto the usb stick. 
Directly running the .exe file did the upgrade, but you would not have
known that from the bios screen or any directions I found.

Regards

 


On 04/14/2018 03:23 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Kevin McCormick  wrote:
>> Upgrade bios for MSI 7677 H61i-e35 (B3) mini-itx motherboard
>>
>> Here are the steps as best I can recall:
>>  ...
>>
>> In conclusion, a working DOS usb boot stick seems to be the key, and it was
>> recommended to use the Windows 98 SE version in one MSI guide.  However, for
>> MSI owners, the lack of help and conflicting/confusing messages from MSI
>> imply that one should proceed with great caution.
> It seems MSI (Micro-Star International) is a company from Taiwan
> (China). It's possible that something was lost in translation.
> However, I do think support from the company itself is very important
> here, and you should do whatever they tell you to do.
>
> Honestly, I don't understand the need for Win98SE (MS-DOS 7.1) here.
> Without downloading it, the link you provided seems to imply a very
> minimal image (1 MB), which is "probably" similar to what Windows 7
> (and RUFUS!) uses (DISKCOPY.DLL) to make a "system floppy", aka EBD
> (emergency boot disk) or whatever.
>
> I did find two .PDFs via quick search:
>
> "BIOS Update Instruction By DOS Tool" (Revision 2.3, 2016/08/02)
> * 
> https://www.msi.com/files/pdf/How_to_make_a_bootable_flash_disk_and_to_flash_BIOS_en.pdf
> (uses UNetBootIn atop Windows [Vista? 7?] to install FreeDOS
> [fdboot.img, 7/24/2011])
> (FreeDOS "safe mode", aka "don't load any drivers", FreeDOS 1.0 final
> from 2006-July-30)
>
> * 
> https://www.msi.com/html/pdf/How_to_flash_MSI_Notebook_BIOS_under_DOS_mode.pdf
> (also uses UNetBootIn atop Windows)
> (FreeDOS "safe mode", aka "don't load any drivers", FreeDOS 1.0 final
> from 2006-July-30)
>
> You basically said you tried other things that didn't work, so maybe
> this is redundant for you. Still, it's hard to understand all of the
> details from afar.

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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Rugxulo]

Hi yet again,

This kind of thing is a bit overwhelming to think about. I just don't
have enough experience to understand or remember every detail.

But I did vaguely remember two old freedos-user messages by Christian
Imhorst that may help even further:


On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 3:23 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Kevin McCormick  wrote:
>>
>> Upgrade bios for MSI 7677 H61i-e35 (B3) mini-itx motherboard
>>
>> Here are the steps as best I can recall:

Re: [Freedos-user] Is anyone installed FreeDOS from USB CD drive or
other USB device?
* https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/32771882/
(fdisk + mkfs.vfat directly on /dev/sdX, then booting via grub4dos +
fd11src.iso by "qemu -m 512 /dev/sdX")

* https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/message/32803806/
(or instead use SysLinux, providing link to his own 256 MB image,
needs dd or win32diskimager)
(oops, seems missing, but hopefully still generally useful tips)

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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Kevin McCormick  wrote:
>
> Upgrade bios for MSI 7677 H61i-e35 (B3) mini-itx motherboard
>
> Here are the steps as best I can recall:
>  ...
>
> In conclusion, a working DOS usb boot stick seems to be the key, and it was
> recommended to use the Windows 98 SE version in one MSI guide.  However, for
> MSI owners, the lack of help and conflicting/confusing messages from MSI
> imply that one should proceed with great caution.

It seems MSI (Micro-Star International) is a company from Taiwan
(China). It's possible that something was lost in translation.
However, I do think support from the company itself is very important
here, and you should do whatever they tell you to do.

Honestly, I don't understand the need for Win98SE (MS-DOS 7.1) here.
Without downloading it, the link you provided seems to imply a very
minimal image (1 MB), which is "probably" similar to what Windows 7
(and RUFUS!) uses (DISKCOPY.DLL) to make a "system floppy", aka EBD
(emergency boot disk) or whatever.

I did find two .PDFs via quick search:

"BIOS Update Instruction By DOS Tool" (Revision 2.3, 2016/08/02)
* 
https://www.msi.com/files/pdf/How_to_make_a_bootable_flash_disk_and_to_flash_BIOS_en.pdf
(uses UNetBootIn atop Windows [Vista? 7?] to install FreeDOS
[fdboot.img, 7/24/2011])
(FreeDOS "safe mode", aka "don't load any drivers", FreeDOS 1.0 final
from 2006-July-30)

* https://www.msi.com/html/pdf/How_to_flash_MSI_Notebook_BIOS_under_DOS_mode.pdf
(also uses UNetBootIn atop Windows)
(FreeDOS "safe mode", aka "don't load any drivers", FreeDOS 1.0 final
from 2006-July-30)

You basically said you tried other things that didn't work, so maybe
this is redundant for you. Still, it's hard to understand all of the
details from afar.

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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Kevin McCormick]

Upgrade bios for MSI 7677 H61i-e35 (B3) mini-itx motherboard

Here are the steps as best I can recall:
 
First download the Windows98SE image (Win98SE_bootdisk.iso) from
http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/98.html
Second download the bios update .exe (in my case
msi_bios_upgrade_7677v63.zip) and unzip it  
 # unzip msi_bios_upgrade_7677v63.zip

Then you must be root to do all this.
1) Use gparted to format usb stick -- msdos partition table + partition
(cylinder alignment) with fat32 file system + set partition boot and lba
flag
2) install syslinux  $ syslinux -s -i /dev/sdb1 (assuming usb partition
is /dev/sdb1 -- make sure)
3) mount usb  $ mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
4) copy files:
    $ cp /usr/share/syslinux/memdisk /mnt/usb   
    $ cp /[path]/Win98SE_bootdisk.iso /mnt/usb
    $ cp /[path]/E7677v63.exe /mnt/usb

5) create the syslinux.cfg file (plain text file) and save to
/mnt/usb/syslinux.cfg
 DEFAULT floppy_iso
 LABEL floppy_iso
    LINUX memdisk
    INITRD Win98SE_bootdisk.iso
    APPEND iso
  -- unmount the usb stick $ umount /mnt/usb

6) (possibly unnecessary) set bios boot order to USB HDD as first entry
    In AMI setup M-Flash screen, save the current bios to the usb (as a
precaution)
   (interestingly, M-Flash offered to upgrade the bios using the bios I
had just saved)
7) boot the usb stick, choose without cdrom support from usb boot menu
 you will see the DOS A:/ prompt, enter C:
    C:/E7677v63  (this will run the bios upgrade program, E7677v63.EXE,
but use the one for your mobo)

Do not remove the USB stick or power off the computer.  There will be
several restarts and the process goes on.
After it was all done, there was a message indicating success.  Then I
dismantled computer and changed the cpu.
Next boot gave a notice "processor changed, enter setup" or similar, so
I entered "restore defaults"

In conclusion, a working DOS usb boot stick seems to be the key, and it
was recommended to use the Windows 98 SE version in one MSI guide. 
However, for MSI owners, the lack of help and conflicting/confusing
messages from MSI imply that one should proceed with great caution.

Now I am having trouble booting my Slackware OS, probably due to
changing from IDE to AHCI, but maybe due to the bios upgrade or putting
sata plugs in the wrong order.  However, the upgraded processor is
working and I think getting the OS to boot will be less trouble than
figuring out the bios upgrade.

Thanks for everyone's comments. 

On 04/07/2018 08:08 AM, Eric Auer wrote:
> Hi Kevin,
>
> the point was that if you have a modern BIOS, it will
> just look for a data file on a FAT-formatted USB stick
> and then update *itself* - You do NOT have to boot any
> DOS from the stick to do that. Of course you can exit
> the setup of FreeDOS 1.0 or 1.2 or skip entering it.
>
> Trying to follow the "flashing BIOS" instructions for
> cases when you had to use old DOS executables as flash
> tool might be a waste of effort with more modern BIOS.
>
> Please check whether your BIOS really wants to run a
> DOS exe file for anything. More likely, it does not.
> If your BIOS just needs a data file, then you do NOT
> have to install any DOS on the stick at all. Simply
> make sure that the stick is FAT formatted and not
> NTFS or ExFAT formatted, then copy your BIOS data
> to the stick and let the BIOS do the rest at boot.
>
> Cheers, Eric
>
> PS: You could use GPARTED to check and modify which
> filesystem your stick uses, with user-friendly GUI.
> Just make sure to write the stick, not OTHER disks.
>
> PPS: IF you find out that you really want to run DOS
> executables, you can install a boot floppy image on
> a stick instead of using entire DOS distro images.
>
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[jamie marchant]

I agree, that's the way it should work. Make sure it's formatted in Fat. 
Also make sure the file is in the correct folder and has the correct name.

On 04/07/2018 09:08 AM, Eric Auer wrote:

Hi Kevin,

the point was that if you have a modern BIOS, it will
just look for a data file on a FAT-formatted USB stick
and then update *itself* - You do NOT have to boot any
DOS from the stick to do that. Of course you can exit
the setup of FreeDOS 1.0 or 1.2 or skip entering it.

Trying to follow the "flashing BIOS" instructions for
cases when you had to use old DOS executables as flash
tool might be a waste of effort with more modern BIOS.

Please check whether your BIOS really wants to run a
DOS exe file for anything. More likely, it does not.
If your BIOS just needs a data file, then you do NOT
have to install any DOS on the stick at all. Simply
make sure that the stick is FAT formatted and not
NTFS or ExFAT formatted, then copy your BIOS data
to the stick and let the BIOS do the rest at boot.

Cheers, Eric

PS: You could use GPARTED to check and modify which
filesystem your stick uses, with user-friendly GUI.
Just make sure to write the stick, not OTHER disks.

PPS: IF you find out that you really want to run DOS
executables, you can install a boot floppy image on
a stick instead of using entire DOS distro images.



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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Rugxulo]

Hi again,

On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 5:07 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 7:54 AM, Kevin McCormick  wrote:
>
>> I have created several bootable usb sticks with syslinux and FreeDOS, but
>> they enter the FreeDOS Setup menu when they are booted.

Usually you press F5 to skip startup files (or single-step via F8).
IIRC, that depends upon not using "SWITCHES=/F /N" in CONFIG.SYS
(which saves a few seconds at bootup if you don't need the delay).

> In theory, I could make you a minimal 64 MB .img from a bootable
> FreeDOS jump drive (which would .ZIP to less than 1 MB). You could
> then low-level copy it onto larger drives, but it would only see 64 MB
> of space (presumably plenty for BIOS data??).

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/metados-0.6-on-64mb-jump-drive.zip

I reformatted my (really old) jump drive with RUFUS (and its own
minimal FreeDOS install) atop Win7. But I deleted those few files and
just unpacked the metados.img via 7z. I also commented out SWITCHES,
as mentioned above, in FDCONFIG.SYS. So you'll probably still need to
press F5 at bootup. Since this is the vanilla MetaDOS image, full
sources are available in the same subdir on iBiblio. It's not a lot of
files, so it takes up (roughly) 1 MB ZIP'd.

For some odd reason, it never boots correctly on this Lenovo desktop,
but I also tested it successfully on my Dell laptop. Some obscure
partition error, but it's probably not worth worrying about. Just try
it, and see what happens. At worst, you waste a whole minute doing
(while unmounted) "cat metados*.img | pv > /dev/sdd" (or whatever).

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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Ralf Quint]

On 4/7/2018 3:07 PM, Rugxulo wrote:

Hi,

N.B. Keep in mind that traditional BIOS (CSM) is going away entirely
in favor of UEFI. So, in future, you'll never have this problem again!

Well, it's just a trade in, you will just get different problems. Just 
try to recover a PC (or worse, laptop) that has it's UEFI setup trashed, 
for example by a faulty Windows 10 update... (I have three such corpses 
laying around here)


Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

N.B. Keep in mind that traditional BIOS (CSM) is going away entirely
in favor of UEFI. So, in future, you'll never have this problem again!

On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 7:54 AM, Kevin McCormick  wrote:
>
> I omitted to say that my operating system is Linux, Slackware 14.2.  The
> Windows solutions of Rufus or a dos formatted usb stick don't work for me
> since these require some form of Windows.  Unetbootin also does not work
> with FreeDOS I.2, but even with a 1.0 image, the usb stick goes into the
> setup routine.

There was a writeup on one guy's blog about FD 1.1 under Linux
("FreeDOS 1.1 Bootable USB Image"), see here:

http://joelinoff.com/blog/?p=431

> I  am now looking at:
>  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Flashing_BIOS_from_Linux
> and
>  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/BIOS_Update#FreeDOS_environment

I'm no expert, but here's some more links:

* https://wiki.debian.org/FlashBIOS
* https://wiki.debian.org/DualBoot/FreeDOS
* 
https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln171755/updating-the-dell-bios-in-linux-and-ubuntu-environments?lang=en#Creating%20a%20USB%20Bootable%20Storage%20Device

> I have created several bootable usb sticks with syslinux and FreeDOS, but
> they enter the FreeDOS Setup menu when they are booted.

Perhaps you want (Perl-based) sys-freedos-linux?

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/sys/sys-freedos-linux/sys-freedos-linux.zip

> I believe I want just the COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS, and a few other files to have 
> the DOS
> functionality that will be needed for the bios update .EXE file.

MSDOS.SYS + IO.SYS = KERNEL.SYS (at least, in FreeDOS)

Bare bones would be shell, kernel, config files, and possibly other
things (e.g. XMS memory manager, keyboard or mouse drivers, etc).

* 
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/

> I imagine the .EXE has the bios rom image included, so some compression 
> software is probably needed.

I don't understand what you mean here. I doubt you need any
compression software for this, but I too don't reflash BIOSes a lot.

> The MSI bios upgrade process is in the initial boot, where you are supposed
> to press DEL to enter bios setup and then select something like M-FLASH or
> FLASH BIOS which then asks you to select a file from the USB stick.  At this
> point the upgrade process stops with a message like unusable file or missing
> files or something which I don't remember exactly.

What file system are you using? Maybe it only recognizes certain ones?
FAT16? FAT32? Dunno.

Part of the problem with pre-made images is differently-sized disks.
In theory, I could make you a minimal 64 MB .img from a bootable
FreeDOS jump drive (which would .ZIP to less than 1 MB). You could
then low-level copy it onto larger drives, but it would only see 64 MB
of space (presumably plenty for BIOS data??).

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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Eric Auer]

Hi Kevin,

the point was that if you have a modern BIOS, it will
just look for a data file on a FAT-formatted USB stick
and then update *itself* - You do NOT have to boot any
DOS from the stick to do that. Of course you can exit
the setup of FreeDOS 1.0 or 1.2 or skip entering it.

Trying to follow the "flashing BIOS" instructions for
cases when you had to use old DOS executables as flash
tool might be a waste of effort with more modern BIOS.

Please check whether your BIOS really wants to run a
DOS exe file for anything. More likely, it does not.
If your BIOS just needs a data file, then you do NOT
have to install any DOS on the stick at all. Simply
make sure that the stick is FAT formatted and not
NTFS or ExFAT formatted, then copy your BIOS data
to the stick and let the BIOS do the rest at boot.

Cheers, Eric

PS: You could use GPARTED to check and modify which
filesystem your stick uses, with user-friendly GUI.
Just make sure to write the stick, not OTHER disks.

PPS: IF you find out that you really want to run DOS
executables, you can install a boot floppy image on
a stick instead of using entire DOS distro images.



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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Kevin McCormick]

I omitted to say that my operating system is Linux, Slackware 14.2.  The
Windows solutions of Rufus or a dos formatted usb stick don't work for
me since these require some form of Windows.  Unetbootin also does not
work with FreeDOS I.2, but even with a 1.0 image, the usb stick goes
into the setup routine. 

I  am now looking at:
 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Flashing_BIOS_from_Linux
and
 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/BIOS_Update#FreeDOS_environment

I do not want to brick the motherboard or reformat the hard drive, and
since I rarely upgrade bios I am not familiar with the process.  I do
have a Windows virtualbox guest on the computer, but the usb stick is
not accessible from that.  I think there is some process for doing that,
but I haven't looked into it.

I have created several bootable usb sticks with syslinux and FreeDOS,
but they enter the FreeDOS Setup menu when they are booted.  I believe I
want just the COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS, and a few other files to have the DOS
functionality that will be needed for the bios update .EXE file.  I
imagine the .EXE has the bios rom image included, so some compression
software is probably needed.

The MSI bios upgrade process is in the initial boot, where you are
supposed to press DEL to enter bios setup and then select something like
M-FLASH or FLASH BIOS which then asks you to select a file from the USB
stick.  At this point the upgrade process stops with a message like
unusable file or missing files or something which I don't remember exactly.

Thanks

On 04/06/2018 08:58 AM, Kevin McCormick wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I subscribed to this list because I am having a lot of trouble making
> a simple dos usb stick to upgrade my computer bios.  It is appalling
> that the my motherboard manufacturer does not have the tools for linux
> (or windows for that matter) and the AMI bios is equally appalling. 
> However, I really don't want to buy another motherboard.
>
> I have no trouble installing freedos into a qemu virtual disk, or
> making a bootable usb stick, but I don't know how to get around the
> freedos setup routine and just have the functionality of a dos boot
> floppy.  Basically, I think I want to copy the necessary "base" files
> onto the usb stick and have the needed /sys files.  I believe that is
> enough for the bios flash to work.
>
> The motherboard is MSI 7677 E61 (B3) mini-tx intel socket 1155.
>
> Thanks
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Felix Miata]

Kevin McCormick composed on 2018-04-06 08:58 (UTC-0500):

> I subscribed to this list because I am having a lot of trouble making a
> simple dos usb stick to upgrade my computer bios.  It is appalling that
> the my motherboard manufacturer does not have the tools for linux (or
> windows for that matter) and the AMI bios is equally appalling. 
> However, I really don't want to buy another motherboard.

> I have no trouble installing freedos into a qemu virtual disk, or making
> a bootable usb stick, but I don't know how to get around the freedos
> setup routine and just have the functionality of a dos boot floppy. 
> Basically, I think I want to copy the necessary "base" files onto the
> usb stick and have the needed /sys files.  I believe that is enough for
> the bios flash to work.

> The motherboard is MSI 7677 E61 (B3) mini-tx intel socket 1155.

You don't need a bootable USB stick. Any FAT USB stick Windows can read will do,
because all the stick needs to have on it is the unpacked new BIOS. The way I
read https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/H61IE35_B3#down-bios the BIOS will
read the stick to find the new BIOS and install it if you simply follow the
instructions on:

https://www.msi.com/files/pdf/How_to_flash_the_BIOS.pdf

IOW, you *don't* need *any* bootable OS to be able to Flash the MSI BIOS. I have
a B85 MSI. All I had to do was put the new BIOS on a stick, go into BIOS setup,
and follow my nose.
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[Freedos-user] usb stick for bios upgrade

[Kevin McCormick]

Hello all,

I subscribed to this list because I am having a lot of trouble making a
simple dos usb stick to upgrade my computer bios.  It is appalling that
the my motherboard manufacturer does not have the tools for linux (or
windows for that matter) and the AMI bios is equally appalling. 
However, I really don't want to buy another motherboard.

I have no trouble installing freedos into a qemu virtual disk, or making
a bootable usb stick, but I don't know how to get around the freedos
setup routine and just have the functionality of a dos boot floppy. 
Basically, I think I want to copy the necessary "base" files onto the
usb stick and have the needed /sys files.  I believe that is enough for
the bios flash to work.

The motherboard is MSI 7677 E61 (B3) mini-tx intel socket 1155.

Thanks
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[RUGXULO]

From: Rugxulo 

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 5:57 PM, Ralf Quint  wrote:
> On 1/2/2017 12:18 PM, dmccunney wrote:
>>
>>> In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card"
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/user/Druaga1/
>>
>> I have Win10 and Ubuntu installed on an SSD on my desktop, and it
>> speeds things up a treat.
>>
>> I could install Win2K to SSD, but there's no point.
>
> A "SD card" and a SSD drive are two totally different animals, it's
> pretty much comparing a Vespa with a Ferrari. Both have a motor, wheels
> and come from Italy, but they both simply service different purposes and
> have hugely different performance...

Okay, this was partially my fault for the confusion. I didn't remember
which videos of his were SSD or not, all I remembered was various
Windows reinstalls, including the (relevant to our conversation)
Win2k, which turned out to be SD instead.

He does a lot of SSD videos, apparently, that's his gimmick (almost).
This wasn't really a true, technical suggestion by me for a learning
tutorial but more along the lines of "hey, look at this guy's videos,
it seems funny / interesting, if you're bored".

On his YouTube channel, I count 11 videos with "SSD" in the title, and
that's just the first page of most recent stuff.

Eventually I'm going to watch the ReactOS video (but it's an hour
long, hence my procrastination, but boy did he upload that one fast!).
Though I don't expect any huge changes in recent updates (e.g. buggy
NTVDM).

P.S. Just to pretend to stay on topic, he does have a few "Ultimate
DOS Machine" videos, too (that I also haven't watched yet).

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[RALF QUINT]

From: Ralf Quint 

On 1/2/2017 12:18 PM, dmccunney wrote:
>
>> In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card":
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-hDOiI0-6s
> I have Win10 and Ubuntu installed on an SSD on my desktop, and it
> speeds things up a treat.
>
> I could install Win2K to SSD, but there's no point.
A "SD card" and a SSD drive are two totally different animals, it's
pretty much comparing a Vespa with a Ferrari. Both have a motor, wheels
and come from Italy, but they both simply service different purposes and
have hugely different performance...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[DMCCUNNEY]

From: dmccunney 

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 12:41 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:52 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
>> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>>
>> My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of
>> flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions.
>
> Do you ever watch YouTube? I found a guy recently (Druaga1) who made
> various videos about (re)installing various Windows on old machines,
> especially regarding him also putting in SSD drives (etc.) to see if
> it increases speed.

I do watch YouTube, but not for stuff like this.  I can *read* a lot
faster than I can *watch*, and I don't need the visual aids if I have
decent written instructions.

> In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card":
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-hDOiI0-6s

I have Win10 and Ubuntu installed on an SSD on my desktop, and it
speeds things up a treat.

I could install Win2K to SSD, but there's no point.

The ancient notebook came to me with WinXP SP2 installed.  It had a
whopping 265MB RAM, and the Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for
code morphing.  XP wants 512MB RAM to *think* about performing.  The
machine as I got it took 8 minutes to simply boot, and a lot more to
do anything.

I reformatted and re-partitioned the drive, installing Win2K on an
NTFS slice, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux on ext4 slices, and FreeDOS on a
FAT32 slice.  Win2K actually runs more or less acceptably in that
little RAM, especially when everything that can be removed from
Startup is.  Ubuntu and Puppy behaved reasonably.  FreeDOS flew.

A roadblock was a limitation to IDE4 for the HD.  This was a BIOS
restriction.  I doubted installing an SSD would provide the sort of
performance boost it might otherwise, and in any case, the machine was
purely a test bed to see what performance I could wring out of it
*without* throwing money at it.  That meant no new hardware.

I had fun tweaking, configuring, and learning, but had no actual
regular job for the machine to do.  When I'd taken it as far as I
could, I put it on a shelf.

>> IIRC, I formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32.  But getting FreeDOS to
*boot*
>> from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling
>> before it worked.  I never did figure out just which fiddle did the
>> trick.  Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K
>> and redo multi-boot under grub2.  I got Windows and Linux booting
>> again, but never could get FreeDOS back.
>>
>> I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more.
>
> Would ms-sys ( http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/ ) help? Dunno!

I don't know either, but frankly don't care.  See above about test bed.

> It's times like that which suggest reformatting / reinstalling. If
> you're not using it anyways (assuming you double-check and backup any
> semi-important files), you may as well fix it.

It simply isn't worth the time and effort involved.  Actually work all
got done elsewhere.  Nothing on the machine would be lost if it went
away.

But I don't have anything to do with the machine if I *did* fix it.
Without a plausible use case, why bother?  I have too many other
things to do with the time it would take.

> The "good" (ha!) thing about Linux is that it becomes obsolete fairly
> quickly, so reinstalling is usually an improvement.

Depends.  I had to reinstall Ubuntu, when a version upgrade failed.
The last step in the upgrade was installing a new kernel.  The new
kernel needed PAE support.  The old box didn't have it.  KErnel
installation failed, and that caused a cascade failure on reboot.  I
wound up wiping, reformatting, and reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch on
its slice, then stopping carefully just *before* the update that
caused the problems.

I don't use the machine anymore, so it no longer matters.

> I had a USB jump drive with antiX Mepis Linux (13.2? circa 2013),
> which was fairly interesting, useful, and quite speedy. Honestly, I
> was morbidly curious how well it would work since they claimed it
> worked on PIII-class machines (aka, obsolete), although I don't have
> that need. But the included Firefox was old (various websites, e.g.
> Google stuff, complained), and it had some other things that were old
> (I forget, honestly). Long story short, I just reinstalled to a newer
> version (16.1?) about a week ago, which brings Firefox ESR, newer
> kernel, and some other goodies.

Browsing was problematic on the old notebook.  Win2K was limited to IE
6 if you ran IE.  Firefox was simply too big and resource hungry under
Win2K or Linux.  It would take something like 45 seconds to load, and
was perceptibly sluggish when up.  Chrome and Opera invoked faster,
but I don't really care for either.  In general, I simply didn't
browse from that machine.

> (And it [still] has DOSBox pre-installed, woot!)

I have a port of DOSBox on my Android tablet, with several old 

Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[RUGXULO]

From: Rugxulo 

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:52 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>
> My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of
> flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions.

Do you ever watch YouTube? I found a guy recently (Druaga1) who made
various videos about (re)installing various Windows on old machines,
especially regarding him also putting in SSD drives (etc.) to see if
it increases speed.

In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-hDOiI0-6s

> IIRC, I formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32.  But getting FreeDOS to
*boot*
> from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling
> before it worked.  I never did figure out just which fiddle did the
> trick.  Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K
> and redo multi-boot under grub2.  I got Windows and Linux booting
> again, but never could get FreeDOS back.
>
> I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more.

Would ms-sys ( http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/ ) help? Dunno!

It's times like that which suggest reformatting / reinstalling. If
you're not using it anyways (assuming you double-check and backup any
semi-important files), you may as well fix it.

The "good" (ha!) thing about Linux is that it becomes obsolete fairly
quickly, so reinstalling is usually an improvement.

I had a USB jump drive with antiX Mepis Linux (13.2? circa 2013),
which was fairly interesting, useful, and quite speedy. Honestly, I
was morbidly curious how well it would work since they claimed it
worked on PIII-class machines (aka, obsolete), although I don't have
that need. But the included Firefox was old (various websites, e.g.
Google stuff, complained), and it had some other things that were old
(I forget, honestly). Long story short, I just reinstalled to a newer
version (16.1?) about a week ago, which brings Firefox ESR, newer
kernel, and some other goodies. (And it [still] has DOSBox
pre-installed, woot!)

>> My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability.
>
> Nor most of mine, but that's why a USB floppy drive is a useful accessory.

In this day and age, we need to backup everything, or heavily rely on
the ever-present network for exchanging files. Relying on static media
is still a valid option, but there is no single ultra-reliable source,
so it's best not to keep too many eggs in one basket. Dare I be naive
and state the obvious? "Free" software is easier to acquire / backup /
(re)install than constantly worrying about proprietary muck. It's not
all doom and gloom, but the simpler the better.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[LOUIS SANTILLAN]

From: Louis Santillan 

If the drive (vs. the floppy) itself remains an issue in the 486,
devices like these [0] are becoming popular.  Just plugin some old USB
flash drive with the image file and you're good to go.

Gotek Floppy Drive Emulator
[0] http://a.co/48x3vtl

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 6:52 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>>> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
>>> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
>>> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
>>> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
>>> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
>>> deserved what you got.
>>
>>> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
>>> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
>>> lying around.
>>
>> I went to that website, mainly for curiosity.
>>
>> Now I don't know how or if the USB floppy drives work, whether some modern
OSes are temperamental in that regard.
>
> I have one here.  It works on my machines, and is seen as A: under
> Windows and /dev/fd0 under Linux (IIRC - not in Linux at the moment.)
> The other modern OS that might be in use is OS/X, but I'm pretty sure
> USB floppy drives work there too.
>
> For more obscure stuff, you try it, and if it breaks, you get to keep
> the pieces.
>
>> For the internal drives, modern motherboards, as far as I can tell, no
longer have floppy headers, making it impossible to connect a regular floppy
drive.
>
> Which is why you use a USB floppy drive if you need to read floppies.
>
>> The modern "floppy" is a USB stick.
>
> Yep.  When I installed Linux to dual boot on my desktop, I did so from
> a bootable USB stick with the Ubuntu installer on it.
>
> That worked because my machine could be set to boot from a USB stick.
> I have FreeDOS installed on an ancient (2005) Notebook.  It has a USB
> 2.0 add-on card and can read USB sticks, but cannot *boot* from them.
> If I were trying to install DOS as the OS on the HD in that machine,
> I'd have to boot from a DOS floppy in the USB floppy drive.  *That*
> will work.
>
>> There are also external USB hard drives, and Micronet Fantom (micronet.com)
external hard drives with both USB 3 and eSATA, up to 8 TB, if my memory is
accurate.
>
> Sounds about right.
>
>> But FreeDOS, and I believe all other DOSes, have trouble with multi-TB hard
drives, and I would want to partition with GPT, meaning not compatible with
FreeDOS or ReactOS.
>
> Yes, they likely will have problems.
>
> DOS understood FAT16 as the file system.  The smallest area of disk
> readable/writable under DOS is the cluster, and every cluster must have
> a unique address.  FAT16 used a 16 bit address, so you had a maximum
> of 65,536 clusters.  The format routine maxed out at 32K cluster sizes,
> so you got a 2GB limit on volume size for early HDs.  Hard drives got much
> larger, and creating multiple 2GB partitions to stay within DOS's FAT16
limits
> got irksome, so MS created FAT32.  But by that point, Windows was taking
> over.  Getting plain DOS to work on a FAT32 file system on larger drives can
> be a challenge. (I believe current FreeDOS kernels have FAT32 support.)
>
> My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of
> flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions. IIRC, I
> formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32.  But getting FreeDOS to *boot*
> from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling
> before it worked.  I never did figure out just which fiddle did the
> trick.  Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K
> and redo multi-boot under grub2.  I got Windows and Linux booting
> again, but never could get FreeDOS back.
>
> I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more.
>
>> My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability.
>
> Nor most of mine, but that's why a USB floppy drive is a useful accessory.
>
>> Tom
> __
> Dennis
>
>
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[DMCCUNNEY]

From: dmccunney 

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Santiago Almenara  wrote:
> 2017-01-01 18:52 GMT-05:00 dmccunney :

>> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
>> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
>> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
>> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
>> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
>> deserved what you got.
>>
>> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
>> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
>> lying around.
>
> Excuse me, I don't want to start a flame war but
>
> I always thought that floppy disks production were pretty dead, maybe some
> obscure Chinese brand were still making them.
> In the other hand, are Imation, 3M or Sony still making floppies???

AFAIK, yes.

But in the stated case, it doesn't matter.

I believe the OP wants to put DOS on a floppy he can boot from, and
from there install it on a hard drive.

It doesn't have to be a top quality, long lasting disk, as nothing of
value will be stored on it long term.  It just has to format and work
long enough.  Cheap noname Chinese floppies will do.

> Santiago
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[DMCCUNNEY]

From: dmccunney 

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 5:33 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:

> I never had a USB floppy drive but have experience with regular floppy
drives, 3.5" and 5.25".
>
> In the later years, I had great trouble with floppy drives.  Ability to
write was lost before the ability to read.  5.25" floppies seemed to have
better shelf life than 3.5".
>
> FreeDOS did better than Linux with floppy drives, and Linux did better than
FreeBSD or NetBSD.
>
> Error messages you got with that floppy disk were roughly consistent with
what I would get with floppies from 1995 and thereabouts.
>
> Even floppies that I had never used proved unusable.

That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
deserved what you got.

Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
lying around.

> Tom
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https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB fl

[THOMAS MUELLER]

From: "Thomas Mueller" 

> I was asked why I cannot put FreeDOS on a floppy. Here is the reason. I
> just tried another floppy disk that I found. It is original from before
> 1995, so it may be broken. I can try to check on my 486 once it is up
> and running, but for now this is what I get on Linux when I put the disk
> into the USB floppy drive.



> [14502.458855] usb 3-1.2: new full-speed USB device number 11 using ehci-pci
> [14502.592376] usb 3-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0409,
> idProduct=0040
> [14502.592381] usb 3-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2,
> SerialNumber=0
> [14502.592385] usb 3-1.2: Product: NEC USB UF000x
> [14502.592387] usb 3-1.2: Manufacturer: NEC
> [14502.594614] usb-storage 3-1.2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
> [14502.594740] usb-storage 3-1.2:1.0: Quirks match for vid 0409 pid 0040: 1
> [14502.594802] scsi host6: usb-storage 3-1.2:1.0
> [14503.654640] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access NEC  USB UF000x
1.60 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
> [14503.666875] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
> [14507.558821] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result:
> hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [14507.558827] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
> [14507.558831] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Cannot read medium -
> unknown format
> [14507.622812] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is on
> [14507.622821] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 46 94 80
> [14507.686775] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
> [14507.686782] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
> [14508.134833] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result:
> hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [14508.134842] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
> [14508.134847] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Cannot read medium -
> unknown format
> [14508.390739] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [14511.206876] EXT4-fs (sdc): unable to read superblock
> [14511.270868] EXT4-fs (sdc): unable to read superblock
> [14511.334865] EXT4-fs (sdc): unable to read superblock
> [14511.398905] FAT-fs (sdc): unable to read boot sector


> I don't really expect help here. It is just a message to get the
> understand for why I cannot load FreeDOS onto a floppy at this time.


> Happy 2017!

> Userbeitrag.

I never had a USB floppy drive but have experience with regular floppy drives,
3.5" and 5.25".

In the later years, I had great trouble with floppy drives.  Ability to write
was lost before the ability to read.  5.25" floppies seemed to have better
shelf life than 3.5".

FreeDOS did better than Linux with floppy drives, and Linux did better than
FreeBSD or NetBSD.

Error messages you got with that floppy disk were roughly consistent with what
I would get with floppies from 1995 and thereabouts.

Even floppies that I had never used proved unusable.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB dr

[RUGXULO]

From: Rugxulo 


Hi,

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 6:28 AM, Sz+agy|-nyi G|ibor 
wrote:
> Hi FreeDOS users!
>
> I would like to use pendrive and USB floppy drive under freedos.

Heck, let me just save you the trouble and paraphrase the local cynic:
"It won't work. Just use Linux." (He's 90% right, USB is a complex
mess that DOS just isn't very good at. But hey, I'll try to give you
some minimal hope, too.)

Floppies (which are limited in size, usually 1.44 MB) are very
obsolete in lieu of so-called "pen drives" (which are many GBs in size
these days). You probably don't "need" both (unless you have lots of
old software only on physical floppy).

Having said that, USB floppy drive should automatically work (thanks
to the BIOS). I have one, it works fine (although I haven't used it
lately). Of course, I don't have any UEFI machines, so I don't know
how those would behave.

Pen drive? You may get quasi-"hard drive" support if you insert the
pen drive before booting (again, thanks to the BIOS). But you can't
change the entire physical disk or eject it while running the OS.

> I found an old article about this.
> http://www.freedos.org/history/technote/203.html

Too old advice.

Bret Johnson wrote some nice "UHCI-only" USB drivers, so if you're
sure your machine supports that mechanism (doubt it), try these:

http://www.bretjohnson.us/

EDIT: Almost forgot about Georg Potthast's (shareware?) drivers:

http://georgpotthast.de/computer/cindex.htm

> My question is: How can I use pendrive and USB mass storage drive under
freedos?

Is "pendrive" not the same thing to you as "USB mass storage drive"?
Do you mean USB hard drive? You're going to have to be more specific
on exactly what devices you want supported.

But, then again, most likely it won't work like you expect. There
isn't much else supported. If you want Linux-level support, just use
Linux. (Sad but true.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] Freedos-user USB driv

[MIKE POWELL]

> From: Rugxulo 

> Having said that, USB floppy drive should automatically work (thanks
> to the BIOS). I have one, it works fine (although I haven't used it
> lately). Of course, I don't have any UEFI machines, so I don't know
> how those would behave.

For the uneducated, what is a "USB floppy drive"?

> But, then again, most likely it won't work like you expect. There
> isn't much else supported. If you want Linux-level support, just use
> Linux. (Sad but true.)

With linux, you can run dosemu with freedos loaded and have a lot of DOS
things that still work.  :)

Mike

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[Freedos-user] USB drives

[SZőGYéNYI GáBOR]

From: Sz+agy|-nyi G|ibor 

Hi FreeDOS users!

I would like to use pendrive and USB floppy drive under freedos. I found an
old article about this.
http://www.freedos.org/history/technote/203.html


My question is: How can I use pendrive and USB mass storage drive under
freedos?

Thanks,
Gabor


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 5:57 PM, Ralf Quint  wrote:
> On 1/2/2017 12:18 PM, dmccunney wrote:
>>
>>> In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card"
>>>
>>> https://www.youtube.com/user/Druaga1/
>>
>> I have Win10 and Ubuntu installed on an SSD on my desktop, and it
>> speeds things up a treat.
>>
>> I could install Win2K to SSD, but there's no point.
>
> A "SD card" and a SSD drive are two totally different animals, it's
> pretty much comparing a Vespa with a Ferrari. Both have a motor, wheels
> and come from Italy, but they both simply service different purposes and
> have hugely different performance...

Okay, this was partially my fault for the confusion. I didn't remember
which videos of his were SSD or not, all I remembered was various
Windows reinstalls, including the (relevant to our conversation)
Win2k, which turned out to be SD instead.

He does a lot of SSD videos, apparently, that's his gimmick (almost).
This wasn't really a true, technical suggestion by me for a learning
tutorial but more along the lines of "hey, look at this guy's videos,
it seems funny / interesting, if you're bored".

On his YouTube channel, I count 11 videos with "SSD" in the title, and
that's just the first page of most recent stuff.

Eventually I'm going to watch the ReactOS video (but it's an hour
long, hence my procrastination, but boy did he upload that one fast!).
Though I don't expect any huge changes in recent updates (e.g. buggy
NTVDM).

P.S. Just to pretend to stay on topic, he does have a few "Ultimate
DOS Machine" videos, too (that I also haven't watched yet).

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[Ralf Quint]

On 1/2/2017 12:18 PM, dmccunney wrote:
>
>> In particular, here's "Installing Windows 2000 on an SD Card":
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-hDOiI0-6s
> I have Win10 and Ubuntu installed on an SSD on my desktop, and it
> speeds things up a treat.
>
> I could install Win2K to SSD, but there's no point.
A "SD card" and a SSD drive are two totally different animals, it's 
pretty much comparing a Vespa with a Ferrari. Both have a motor, wheels 
and come from Italy, but they both simply service different purposes and 
have hugely different performance...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[Louis Santillan]

If the drive (vs. the floppy) itself remains an issue in the 486,
devices like these [0] are becoming popular.  Just plugin some old USB
flash drive with the image file and you're good to go.

Gotek Floppy Drive Emulator
[0] http://a.co/48x3vtl

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 6:52 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>>> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
>>> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
>>> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
>>> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
>>> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
>>> deserved what you got.
>>
>>> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
>>> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
>>> lying around.
>>
>> I went to that website, mainly for curiosity.
>>
>> Now I don't know how or if the USB floppy drives work, whether some modern 
>> OSes are temperamental in that regard.
>
> I have one here.  It works on my machines, and is seen as A: under
> Windows and /dev/fd0 under Linux (IIRC - not in Linux at the moment.)
> The other modern OS that might be in use is OS/X, but I'm pretty sure
> USB floppy drives work there too.
>
> For more obscure stuff, you try it, and if it breaks, you get to keep
> the pieces.
>
>> For the internal drives, modern motherboards, as far as I can tell, no 
>> longer have floppy headers, making it impossible to connect a regular floppy 
>> drive.
>
> Which is why you use a USB floppy drive if you need to read floppies.
>
>> The modern "floppy" is a USB stick.
>
> Yep.  When I installed Linux to dual boot on my desktop, I did so from
> a bootable USB stick with the Ubuntu installer on it.
>
> That worked because my machine could be set to boot from a USB stick.
> I have FreeDOS installed on an ancient (2005) Notebook.  It has a USB
> 2.0 add-on card and can read USB sticks, but cannot *boot* from them.
> If I were trying to install DOS as the OS on the HD in that machine,
> I'd have to boot from a DOS floppy in the USB floppy drive.  *That*
> will work.
>
>> There are also external USB hard drives, and Micronet Fantom (micronet.com) 
>> external hard drives with both USB 3 and eSATA, up to 8 TB, if my memory is 
>> accurate.
>
> Sounds about right.
>
>> But FreeDOS, and I believe all other DOSes, have trouble with multi-TB hard 
>> drives, and I would want to partition with GPT, meaning not compatible with 
>> FreeDOS or ReactOS.
>
> Yes, they likely will have problems.
>
> DOS understood FAT16 as the file system.  The smallest area of disk
> readable/writable under DOS is the cluster, and every cluster must have
> a unique address.  FAT16 used a 16 bit address, so you had a maximum
> of 65,536 clusters.  The format routine maxed out at 32K cluster sizes,
> so you got a 2GB limit on volume size for early HDs.  Hard drives got much
> larger, and creating multiple 2GB partitions to stay within DOS's FAT16 limits
> got irksome, so MS created FAT32.  But by that point, Windows was taking
> over.  Getting plain DOS to work on a FAT32 file system on larger drives can
> be a challenge. (I believe current FreeDOS kernels have FAT32 support.)
>
> My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of
> flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions. IIRC, I
> formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32.  But getting FreeDOS to *boot*
> from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling
> before it worked.  I never did figure out just which fiddle did the
> trick.  Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K
> and redo multi-boot under grub2.  I got Windows and Linux booting
> again, but never could get FreeDOS back.
>
> I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more.
>
>> My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability.
>
> Nor most of mine, but that's why a USB floppy drive is a useful accessory.
>
>> Tom
> __
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:
>> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
>> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
>> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
>> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
>> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
>> deserved what you got.
>
>> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
>> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
>> lying around.
>
> I went to that website, mainly for curiosity.
>
> Now I don't know how or if the USB floppy drives work, whether some modern 
> OSes are temperamental in that regard.

I have one here.  It works on my machines, and is seen as A: under
Windows and /dev/fd0 under Linux (IIRC - not in Linux at the moment.)
The other modern OS that might be in use is OS/X, but I'm pretty sure
USB floppy drives work there too.

For more obscure stuff, you try it, and if it breaks, you get to keep
the pieces.

> For the internal drives, modern motherboards, as far as I can tell, no longer 
> have floppy headers, making it impossible to connect a regular floppy drive.

Which is why you use a USB floppy drive if you need to read floppies.

> The modern "floppy" is a USB stick.

Yep.  When I installed Linux to dual boot on my desktop, I did so from
a bootable USB stick with the Ubuntu installer on it.

That worked because my machine could be set to boot from a USB stick.
I have FreeDOS installed on an ancient (2005) Notebook.  It has a USB
2.0 add-on card and can read USB sticks, but cannot *boot* from them.
If I were trying to install DOS as the OS on the HD in that machine,
I'd have to boot from a DOS floppy in the USB floppy drive.  *That*
will work.

> There are also external USB hard drives, and Micronet Fantom (micronet.com) 
> external hard drives with both USB 3 and eSATA, up to 8 TB, if my memory is 
> accurate.

Sounds about right.

> But FreeDOS, and I believe all other DOSes, have trouble with multi-TB hard 
> drives, and I would want to partition with GPT, meaning not compatible with 
> FreeDOS or ReactOS.

Yes, they likely will have problems.

DOS understood FAT16 as the file system.  The smallest area of disk
readable/writable under DOS is the cluster, and every cluster must have
a unique address.  FAT16 used a 16 bit address, so you had a maximum
of 65,536 clusters.  The format routine maxed out at 32K cluster sizes,
so you got a 2GB limit on volume size for early HDs.  Hard drives got much
larger, and creating multiple 2GB partitions to stay within DOS's FAT16 limits
got irksome, so MS created FAT32.  But by that point, Windows was taking
over.  Getting plain DOS to work on a FAT32 file system on larger drives can
be a challenge. (I believe current FreeDOS kernels have FAT32 support.)

My old notebook was set to multiboot, with Win2K Pro, a couple of
flavors of Linux, and FreeDOS on separate HD partitions. IIRC, I
formatted the FreeDOS partition FAT32.  But getting FreeDOS to *boot*
from a grub2 menu was a challenge, and I had to do a lot of fiddling
before it worked.  I never did figure out just which fiddle did the
trick.  Then an unrelated problem forced me to wipe and reinstall 2K
and redo multi-boot under grub2.  I got Windows and Linux booting
again, but never could get FreeDOS back.

I haven't even booted the machine in a year or more.

> My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability.

Nor most of mine, but that's why a USB floppy drive is a useful accessory.

> Tom
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[Thomas Mueller]

> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
> deserved what you got.
 
> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
> lying around.

I went to that website, mainly for curiosity.

Now I don't know how or if the USB floppy drives work, whether some modern OSes 
are temperamental in that regard.

For the internal drives, modern motherboards, as far as I can tell, no longer 
have floppy headers, making it impossible to connect a regular floppy drive.

The modern "floppy" is a USB stick.

There are also external USB hard drives, and Micronet Fantom (micronet.com) 
external hard drives with both USB 3 and eSATA, up to 8 TB, if my memory is 
accurate.

But FreeDOS, and I believe all other DOSes, have trouble with multi-TB hard 
drives, and I would want to partition with GPT, meaning not compatible with 
FreeDOS or ReactOS.

My computer hardware no longer has any floppy capability.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 7:09 PM, Santiago Almenara  wrote:
> 2017-01-01 18:52 GMT-05:00 dmccunney :

>> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
>> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
>> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
>> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
>> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
>> deserved what you got.
>>
>> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
>> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
>> lying around.
>
> Excuse me, I don't want to start a flame war but
>
> I always thought that floppy disks production were pretty dead, maybe some
> obscure Chinese brand were still making them.
> In the other hand, are Imation, 3M or Sony still making floppies???

AFAIK, yes.

But in the stated case, it doesn't matter.

I believe the OP wants to put DOS on a floppy he can boot from, and
from there install it on a hard drive.

It doesn't have to be a top quality, long lasting disk, as nothing of
value will be stored on it long term.  It just has to format and work
long enough.  Cheap noname Chinese floppies will do.

> Santiago
__
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[Santiago Almenara]

Excuse me, I don't want to start a flame war but

I always thought that floppy disks production were pretty dead, maybe some
obscure Chinese brand were still making them.
In the other hand, are Imation, 3M or Sony still making floppies???

Happy New Year!


Santiago


2017-01-01 18:52 GMT-05:00 dmccunney :

> On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 5:33 PM, Thomas Mueller 
> wrote:
>
> > I never had a USB floppy drive but have experience with regular floppy
> drives, 3.5" and 5.25".
> >
> > In the later years, I had great trouble with floppy drives.  Ability to
> write was lost before the ability to read.  5.25" floppies seemed to have
> better shelf life than 3.5".
> >
> > FreeDOS did better than Linux with floppy drives, and Linux did better
> than FreeBSD or NetBSD.
> >
> > Error messages you got with that floppy disk were roughly consistent
> with what I would get with floppies from 1995 and thereabouts.
> >
> > Even floppies that I had never used proved unusable.
>
> That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
> which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
> floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
> now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
> varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
> deserved what you got.
>
> Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
> get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
> lying around.
>
> > Tom
> __
> Dennis
> https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519
>
> 
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 5:33 PM, Thomas Mueller  wrote:

> I never had a USB floppy drive but have experience with regular floppy 
> drives, 3.5" and 5.25".
>
> In the later years, I had great trouble with floppy drives.  Ability to write 
> was lost before the ability to read.  5.25" floppies seemed to have better 
> shelf life than 3.5".
>
> FreeDOS did better than Linux with floppy drives, and Linux did better than 
> FreeBSD or NetBSD.
>
> Error messages you got with that floppy disk were roughly consistent with 
> what I would get with floppies from 1995 and thereabouts.
>
> Even floppies that I had never used proved unusable.

That brings back memories.  Back in the day, there was discussion of
which *brand* of floppies to use, if you wanted to write something to
floppy, put it on a shelf, and be able to read it again 5 years from
now.  At the time, the "gold standard" was Dysan.  Floppy disk media
varied in quality, and if you bought based on lowest price, you
deserved what you got.

Floppies are sill made and sold - see http://www.floppydisk.com/.  I'd
get new ones to try this on instead of trying to reuse ancient stuff
lying around.

> Tom
__
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB floppy cannot read medium on modern PC and Linux.

[Thomas Mueller]

> I was asked why I cannot put FreeDOS on a floppy. Here is the reason. I
> just tried another floppy disk that I found. It is original from before
> 1995, so it may be broken. I can try to check on my 486 once it is up
> and running, but for now this is what I get on Linux when I put the disk
> into the USB floppy drive.



> [14502.458855] usb 3-1.2: new full-speed USB device number 11 using ehci-pci
> [14502.592376] usb 3-1.2: New USB device found, idVendor=0409,
> idProduct=0040
> [14502.592381] usb 3-1.2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2,
> SerialNumber=0
> [14502.592385] usb 3-1.2: Product: NEC USB UF000x
> [14502.592387] usb 3-1.2: Manufacturer: NEC
> [14502.594614] usb-storage 3-1.2:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
> [14502.594740] usb-storage 3-1.2:1.0: Quirks match for vid 0409 pid 0040: 1
> [14502.594802] scsi host6: usb-storage 3-1.2:1.0
> [14503.654640] scsi 6:0:0:0: Direct-Access NEC  USB UF000x
1.60 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
> [14503.666875] sd 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
> [14507.558821] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result:
> hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [14507.558827] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
> [14507.558831] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Cannot read medium -
> unknown format
> [14507.622812] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is on
> [14507.622821] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 46 94 80
> [14507.686775] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
> [14507.686782] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
> [14508.134833] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result:
> hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
> [14508.134842] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
> [14508.134847] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Cannot read medium -
> unknown format
> [14508.390739] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
> [14511.206876] EXT4-fs (sdc): unable to read superblock
> [14511.270868] EXT4-fs (sdc): unable to read superblock
> [14511.334865] EXT4-fs (sdc): unable to read superblock
> [14511.398905] FAT-fs (sdc): unable to read boot sector


> I don't really expect help here. It is just a message to get the
> understand for why I cannot load FreeDOS onto a floppy at this time.


> Happy 2017!

> Userbeitrag.

I never had a USB floppy drive but have experience with regular floppy drives, 
3.5" and 5.25".

In the later years, I had great trouble with floppy drives.  Ability to write 
was lost before the ability to read.  5.25" floppies seemed to have better 
shelf life than 3.5".

FreeDOS did better than Linux with floppy drives, and Linux did better than 
FreeBSD or NetBSD.

Error messages you got with that floppy disk were roughly consistent with what 
I would get with floppies from 1995 and thereabouts.

Even floppies that I had never used proved unusable.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] Freedos-user USB driv

[Ralf Quint]

On 11/8/2016 7:38 AM, Mike Powell wrote:
>
> For the uneducated, what is a "USB floppy drive"?
A floppy drive connected via a USB port...

Google it and you will find it, for example
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Floppy-Drive-FL-UDRV/dp/B00E9MD700

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] Freedos-user USB driv

[Mike Powell]

Originally to: Rugxulo

> From: Rugxulo 

> Having said that, USB floppy drive should automatically work (thanks
> to the BIOS). I have one, it works fine (although I haven't used it
> lately). Of course, I don't have any UEFI machines, so I don't know
> how those would behave.

For the uneducated, what is a "USB floppy drive"?

> But, then again, most likely it won't work like you expect. There
> isn't much else supported. If you want Linux-level support, just use
> Linux. (Sad but true.)

With linux, you can run dosemu with freedos loaded and have a lot of DOS
things that still work.  :)

Mike

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB drives under Freedos

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 6:28 AM, Szőgyényi Gábor  wrote:
> Hi FreeDOS users!
>
> I would like to use pendrive and USB floppy drive under freedos.

Heck, let me just save you the trouble and paraphrase the local cynic:
"It won't work. Just use Linux." (He's 90% right, USB is a complex
mess that DOS just isn't very good at. But hey, I'll try to give you
some minimal hope, too.)

Floppies (which are limited in size, usually 1.44 MB) are very
obsolete in lieu of so-called "pen drives" (which are many GBs in size
these days). You probably don't "need" both (unless you have lots of
old software only on physical floppy).

Having said that, USB floppy drive should automatically work (thanks
to the BIOS). I have one, it works fine (although I haven't used it
lately). Of course, I don't have any UEFI machines, so I don't know
how those would behave.

Pen drive? You may get quasi-"hard drive" support if you insert the
pen drive before booting (again, thanks to the BIOS). But you can't
change the entire physical disk or eject it while running the OS.

> I found an old article about this.
> http://www.freedos.org/history/technote/203.html

Too old advice.

Bret Johnson wrote some nice "UHCI-only" USB drivers, so if you're
sure your machine supports that mechanism (doubt it), try these:

http://www.bretjohnson.us/

EDIT: Almost forgot about Georg Potthast's (shareware?) drivers:

http://georgpotthast.de/computer/cindex.htm

> My question is: How can I use pendrive and USB mass storage drive under 
> freedos?

Is "pendrive" not the same thing to you as "USB mass storage drive"?
Do you mean USB hard drive? You're going to have to be more specific
on exactly what devices you want supported.

But, then again, most likely it won't work like you expect. There
isn't much else supported. If you want Linux-level support, just use
Linux. (Sad but true.)

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[Freedos-user] USB drives under Freedos

[Szőgyényi Gábor]

Hi FreeDOS users!

I would like to use pendrive and USB floppy drive under freedos. I found an old 
article about this.
http://www.freedos.org/history/technote/203.html


My question is: How can I use pendrive and USB mass storage drive under freedos?

Thanks,
Gabor


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Dale E Sterner]

The details I don't know but I have had it higher with FREEDOS
and it works fine. I wish FREEDOS had a xon/xoff with its mode command
When the printer stops to clean its pen it falls behind and screws up.
The adapter is an rs232 to bluethooth and works just like a modem
with AT command set. I pair it with xtalk then xd out to print


cheers
DS




On Sun, 24 Apr 2016 09:38:03 -0700 Ralf Quint 
writes:
> On 4/24/2016 7:25 AM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> > I load my software on cf chips so I'm running pure dos
> > no windows. When you read the help section it implies
> > that 19200 exists but when you try the command
> > it comes back not allowed. Even windows 7 has a
> > 9600 limit. You can set it in the control panel to over 115000 
> baud
> > then click ok and it sets it right back 9600. It won't
> > keep the higher setting.
> Then you have a problem with your system. I can set on all of my 
> Windows 
> machines that have a true serial port till easily 115k baud and it 
> works 
> that way just fine, do this currently for a lot of IoT work. I 
> suspect 
> you rather have a hardware issue that is preventing you from 
> achieving a 
> higher speed, maybe whatever serial to Bluetooth converter you are 
> using. What is the actual UART in your system? On what port address?
> 
> Ralf
> 
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[TJ Edmister]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2016 21:30:03 -0400, Ralf Quint   
wrote:

> On 4/23/2016 6:53 PM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
>> The copy command is limited to what you set the mode command to.
>> FREEDOS lets you set the baud very high but other dos's and
>> even windows has 9600 baud as the upper limit, well below
>> the uarts top speed.
>> If I type copy filename.prn com1: in any other dos besides FREEDOS
>> its top transmission speed is 9600. Any graphics file would take a few
>> minutes at that speed. Text file are ok at 9600 but pictures take
>> forever.
>> Terminal software like xtalk only send text files at high speeds.
>> For photos you need the dos copy command.
> Sorry, but all of this is NOT correct. Once again, nothing in DOS limits
> how high you set the UART speed

No, he's right. The MODE command under MS-DOS 6.0 as well as Win98 is  
arbitrarily limited to 19200bps. Doesn't mean that other programs can't  
set a higher speed themselves, but MODE cannot.

However under Windows 7 32-bit, the MODE command doesn't appear to have  
any limits. (I can set eg. MODE COM3: baud=66 and it will accept that,  
although this is not a "real" serial port)

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Ralf Quint]

On 4/24/2016 7:25 AM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> I load my software on cf chips so I'm running pure dos
> no windows. When you read the help section it implies
> that 19200 exists but when you try the command
> it comes back not allowed. Even windows 7 has a
> 9600 limit. You can set it in the control panel to over 115000 baud
> then click ok and it sets it right back 9600. It won't
> keep the higher setting.
Then you have a problem with your system. I can set on all of my Windows 
machines that have a true serial port till easily 115k baud and it works 
that way just fine, do this currently for a lot of IoT work. I suspect 
you rather have a hardware issue that is preventing you from achieving a 
higher speed, maybe whatever serial to Bluetooth converter you are 
using. What is the actual UART in your system? On what port address?

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[dmccunney]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Dale E Sterner  wrote:
> I load my software on cf chips so I'm running pure dos
> no windows.

We know.  You've said so before.  Running from CF card is irrelevant
to the problem.

> When you read the help section it implies>
> that 19200 exists but when you try the command
> it comes back not allowed.

The reference I looked at said it might not work on all systems.
Yours is apparently one where it doesn't.

> Even windows 7 has a 9600 limit. You can set it in the control panel to over 
> 115000 baud
> then click ok and it sets it right back 9600. It won't keep the higher 
> setting.

As mentioned, copy over and use the FreeDOS mode command in place of
the MSDOS 7.1 version.

> cheers
> DS
__
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Dale E Sterner]

I load my software on cf chips so I'm running pure dos
no windows. When you read the help section it implies 
that 19200 exists but when you try the command
it comes back not allowed. Even windows 7 has a
9600 limit. You can set it in the control panel to over 115000 baud
then click ok and it sets it right back 9600. It won't
keep the higher setting.


cheers
DS



On Sat, 23 Apr 2016 21:31:21 -0400 dmccunney 
writes:
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 9:53 PM, Dale E Sterner  
> wrote:
> > The copy command is limited to what you set the mode command to.
> > FREEDOS lets you set the baud very high but other dos's and
> > even windows has 9600 baud as the upper limit, well below
> > the uarts top speed.
> 
> It's been too long since I ran a pure DOS setup, and I don't recall
> details.  But I was running MS/PC DOS since the 2.X days, and I 
> don't
> recall this ever being a problem.
> 
> MODE COM BAUD=19 *doesn't* set the baud rate to 19.2kb?
> 
> If MSDOS 7.1's mode command won't let you set a baud rate beyond 
> 9600,
> don't use it.  Copy over the FreeDOS mode command, and use it 
> instead.
> I know no reason why it shouldn't work.
> 
> I'd also use XCOPY or a variant, but that's another matter.
> __
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> 
>
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**
>From Dale Sterner - MS organic chemistry
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***



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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Dale E Sterner]

You're right about error correction. It doesn't exist with the copy
command-pity.
But if your software doesn't have high speed serial enabled then you 
only have left the dos copy command. Most software will print to a .prn
file.
which you can copy to the printer. Most software targets to the lpt1
port.
Since the printer is in the next room a 20 ft cable would be needed.
Modern bluetooth works fairly well. If there is an error in transmission
its a train wreck but if you have the antennas lined up well, its usually
not a serious problem.

cheers
DS

On Sat, 23 Apr 2016 18:30:03 -0700 Ralf Quint 
writes:
> On 4/23/2016 6:53 PM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> > The copy command is limited to what you set the mode command to.
> > FREEDOS lets you set the baud very high but other dos's and
> > even windows has 9600 baud as the upper limit, well below
> > the uarts top speed.
> > If I type copy filename.prn com1: in any other dos besides FREEDOS
> > its top transmission speed is 9600. Any graphics file would take a 
> few
> > minutes at that speed. Text file are ok at 9600 but pictures take
> > forever.
> > Terminal software like xtalk only send text files at high speeds.
> > For photos you need the dos copy command.
> Sorry, but all of this is NOT correct. Once again, nothing in DOS 
> limits 
> how high you set the UART speed, and certainly nothing in Windows.
> 
> I have been using serial devices (not USB) with 115k baud for 
> decades, 
> likewise transferred non-text files over serial connections for that 
> 
> long as well, even using such antic dinosaurs like Kermit to 
> transfer 
> programs (executables) as well as graphics between MS-DOS and other 
> systems like Unix SysV or Atari 520, because I had only BBS access 
> (this 
> was before there was what today is called an "Internet") on my 
> MS-DOS 
> (later Windows 3.11) system.
> At work back in the late '80s/early'90s (CAD software company) we 
> were 
> running serial connected plotters at 56K and 115k baud, pretty much 
> all 
> of our digitizer tablets ran at 38.4k baud. And I had one of the 
> first 
> modems running at 56K baud when the standard was still 28.8K or 
> 33.6K. 
> All in DOS...
> 
> If you set the baud rate with the FreeDOS mode command, on any DOS, 
> a 
> copy command will work, however, there is no handshake, no error 
> correction, so you need to have a 100% working serial connection to 
> have 
> that working.  A copy to COM[1,2] otherwise will work at whatever 
> the 
> speed of the UART is set to.
> 
> Ralf
> 
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**
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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[dmccunney]

On Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 9:53 PM, Dale E Sterner  wrote:
> The copy command is limited to what you set the mode command to.
> FREEDOS lets you set the baud very high but other dos's and
> even windows has 9600 baud as the upper limit, well below
> the uarts top speed.

It's been too long since I ran a pure DOS setup, and I don't recall
details.  But I was running MS/PC DOS since the 2.X days, and I don't
recall this ever being a problem.

MODE COM BAUD=19 *doesn't* set the baud rate to 19.2kb?

If MSDOS 7.1's mode command won't let you set a baud rate beyond 9600,
don't use it.  Copy over the FreeDOS mode command, and use it instead.
I know no reason why it shouldn't work.

I'd also use XCOPY or a variant, but that's another matter.
__
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Ralf Quint]

On 4/23/2016 6:53 PM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> The copy command is limited to what you set the mode command to.
> FREEDOS lets you set the baud very high but other dos's and
> even windows has 9600 baud as the upper limit, well below
> the uarts top speed.
> If I type copy filename.prn com1: in any other dos besides FREEDOS
> its top transmission speed is 9600. Any graphics file would take a few
> minutes at that speed. Text file are ok at 9600 but pictures take
> forever.
> Terminal software like xtalk only send text files at high speeds.
> For photos you need the dos copy command.
Sorry, but all of this is NOT correct. Once again, nothing in DOS limits 
how high you set the UART speed, and certainly nothing in Windows.

I have been using serial devices (not USB) with 115k baud for decades, 
likewise transferred non-text files over serial connections for that 
long as well, even using such antic dinosaurs like Kermit to transfer 
programs (executables) as well as graphics between MS-DOS and other 
systems like Unix SysV or Atari 520, because I had only BBS access (this 
was before there was what today is called an "Internet") on my MS-DOS 
(later Windows 3.11) system.
At work back in the late '80s/early'90s (CAD software company) we were 
running serial connected plotters at 56K and 115k baud, pretty much all 
of our digitizer tablets ran at 38.4k baud. And I had one of the first 
modems running at 56K baud when the standard was still 28.8K or 33.6K. 
All in DOS...

If you set the baud rate with the FreeDOS mode command, on any DOS, a 
copy command will work, however, there is no handshake, no error 
correction, so you need to have a 100% working serial connection to have 
that working.  A copy to COM[1,2] otherwise will work at whatever the 
speed of the UART is set to.

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Dale E Sterner]

The copy command is limited to what you set the mode command to.
FREEDOS lets you set the baud very high but other dos's and
even windows has 9600 baud as the upper limit, well below
the uarts top speed. 
If I type copy filename.prn com1: in any other dos besides FREEDOS
its top transmission speed is 9600. Any graphics file would take a few
minutes at that speed. Text file are ok at 9600 but pictures take
forever.
Terminal software like xtalk only send text files at high speeds.
For photos you need the dos copy command.


cheers
DS



On Sat, 23 Apr 2016 17:25:57 -0700 Ralf Quint 
writes:
> On 4/23/2016 5:40 PM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> > Its not only MSdos 7.1 but other dos's that limit the uart speed
> > to 9600 baud. The mode command doesn't go higher than 9600 baud.
> > I use the dos copy command to send the .prn files to a bluetooth 
> printer.
> > At 9600 baud you can take a nice long coffee break while it 
> prints.
> > FREEDOS doesn't have a limit like that. What is the point of 
> making
> > fast uarts if the software holds you back.
> Again, no DOS is limiting the capabilities of the UART, I don't have 
> a 
> working setup anymore since my last move, but I doubt that any DOS 
> mode 
> command is limited to just 9600 baud. And if push comes to shove, 
> just 
> use any terminal program to set the UART to a higher speed. Or use 
> the 
> FreeDOS mode command, it's the tool that would be limitation, not 
> any 
> form of DOS...
> 
> Just did only a very quick Google search and M$ themself list that 
> least 
> an option to set the baud rate to 19200 baud (speed parameter "19").
> 
> Ralf
> 
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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Ralf Quint]

On 4/23/2016 5:40 PM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> Its not only MSdos 7.1 but other dos's that limit the uart speed
> to 9600 baud. The mode command doesn't go higher than 9600 baud.
> I use the dos copy command to send the .prn files to a bluetooth printer.
> At 9600 baud you can take a nice long coffee break while it prints.
> FREEDOS doesn't have a limit like that. What is the point of making
> fast uarts if the software holds you back.
Again, no DOS is limiting the capabilities of the UART, I don't have a 
working setup anymore since my last move, but I doubt that any DOS mode 
command is limited to just 9600 baud. And if push comes to shove, just 
use any terminal program to set the UART to a higher speed. Or use the 
FreeDOS mode command, it's the tool that would be limitation, not any 
form of DOS...

Just did only a very quick Google search and M$ themself list that least 
an option to set the baud rate to 19200 baud (speed parameter "19").

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Dale E Sterner]

Its not only MSdos 7.1 but other dos's that limit the uart speed
to 9600 baud. The mode command doesn't go higher than 9600 baud.
I use the dos copy command to send the .prn files to a bluetooth printer.
At 9600 baud you can take a nice long coffee break while it prints.
FREEDOS doesn't have a limit like that. What is the point of making
fast uarts if the software holds you back. 


cheers
DS



On Sat, 23 Apr 2016 12:10:21 -0700 Ralf Quint 
writes:
> On 4/23/2016 9:55 AM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> > Your the one who pointed me to MSdos 7.1.
> > I've noticed a few annoying short coming
> > for msdos7.1 that FREEDOS doesn't have.
> > 1st it limits the rs232 output to 9600 baud.
> No, it doesn't. I used in fact a Windows 98SE machine booting 
> without 
> GUI for years at a environmental project where we got sensor data 
> via 
> 115200 baud.
> 
> > Most URATs can go to 115000 which is what I often use.
> Well, DOS does not inhibit the capabilities of any UART. The serial 
> port 
> might be by default be initialized at 9600 baud, but there is no 
> reason 
> that any application using any serial port can set it to any 
> parameter 
> the UART is in fact capable of...
> > I use rs232 to print bluetooth from dos.
> > 9600 baud is crawl speed
> > The other is when I tried to install a sound driver
> > on my laptop. MSdos7.1 insists that I use windows
> > to install it so that I can enjoy the windows/dos enperience.
> After all, there is no MS-DOS 7.1, it is in fact Windows 98.
> 
> But with just a somewhat hazy problem description, it is hard to 
> tell 
> what might be amiss here...
> 
> Ralf
> 
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http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jo00975a052
***


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Ralf Quint]

On 4/23/2016 9:55 AM, Dale E Sterner wrote:
> Your the one who pointed me to MSdos 7.1.
> I've noticed a few annoying short coming
> for msdos7.1 that FREEDOS doesn't have.
> 1st it limits the rs232 output to 9600 baud.
No, it doesn't. I used in fact a Windows 98SE machine booting without 
GUI for years at a environmental project where we got sensor data via 
115200 baud.

> Most URATs can go to 115000 which is what I often use.
Well, DOS does not inhibit the capabilities of any UART. The serial port 
might be by default be initialized at 9600 baud, but there is no reason 
that any application using any serial port can set it to any parameter 
the UART is in fact capable of...
> I use rs232 to print bluetooth from dos.
> 9600 baud is crawl speed
> The other is when I tried to install a sound driver
> on my laptop. MSdos7.1 insists that I use windows
> to install it so that I can enjoy the windows/dos enperience.
After all, there is no MS-DOS 7.1, it is in fact Windows 98.

But with just a somewhat hazy problem description, it is hard to tell 
what might be amiss here...

Ralf

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Dale E Sterner]

Your the one who pointed me to MSdos 7.1.
I've noticed a few annoying short coming
for msdos7.1 that FREEDOS doesn't have.
1st it limits the rs232 output to 9600 baud.
Most URATs can go to 115000 which is what I often use.
I use rs232 to print bluetooth from dos.
9600 baud is crawl speed
The other is when I tried to install a sound driver
on my laptop. MSdos7.1 insists that I use windows
to install it so that I can enjoy the windows/dos enperience.
FREEDOS just installs it, no arguments from it.
Other than that MSdos7.1 is very nice.

cheers
DS



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Re: [Freedos-user] USB read/write capabilities

[Patruck]

For anyone who's interested, the answer is yes, it can be done. Thanks to the
original Motto Hairu drivers (Usbaspi.sys and di1000dd.sys), just loaded
into fdconfig.sys, at least my USB key was correctly recognized. I was
capable both to read and to write on that with no evident flaws.



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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Mateusz Viste]

On 01/11/2015 02:05, Mark LaPierre wrote:
> Does FreeDOS support USB ports?

FreeDOS, as any other DOS I know, doesn't. But there are drivers out 
there that can talk to xHCI controllers and map mass storage USB media 
to DOS drives.

Bret kindly provides such drivers under an open-source license:

http://bretjohnson.us/

There is also this proprietary blob from Panasonic:

http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-usb.html

I haven't tested any of the above, sorry.


Mateusz


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Thomas Mueller]

from Marc LaPierre:

> Does FreeDOS support USB ports?

Sort of.  I believe USB support is from the BIOS or UEFI.

I believe USB keyboards are OK, not sure about USB mice.

My experience with USB sticks in FreeDOS is that they are treated as fixed 
disks: must be present at boot, and FreeDOS won't recognize a change of USB 
sticks.

Others on this list might be able to give a better answer.


Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Sun, Nov 1, 2015 at 2:01 AM, Mateusz Viste  wrote:
>
> On 01/11/2015 02:05, Mark LaPierre wrote:
>>
>> Does FreeDOS support USB ports?
>
> Bret kindly provides such drivers under an open-source license:
>
> http://bretjohnson.us/

IIRC, that is UHCI only, so unlikely to work on all machines. Still,
far better than nothing.

As mentioned, sometimes the BIOS can pretend a USB drive is a hard
disk, if plugged in at boot time.

A separate issue is actually booting from a USB jump drive, e.g. RUFUS
and/or PLoP Boot Manager:

a). http://rufus.akeo.ie/
b). https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

Though I'm not sure exactly what the OP wanted to accomplish.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Mark LaPierre]

On 11/01/15 15:08, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> I can speak to the Panasonic one, it is fantastic!
> At least in ms dos 7.1 which I use instead of freedos.
> Karen
> 
> 
> On Sun, 1 Nov 2015, Mateusz Viste wrote:
> 
>> On 01/11/2015 02:05, Mark LaPierre wrote:
>>> Does FreeDOS support USB ports?
>>
>> FreeDOS, as any other DOS I know, doesn't. But there are drivers out
>> there that can talk to xHCI controllers and map mass storage USB media
>> to DOS drives.
>>
>> Bret kindly provides such drivers under an open-source license:
>>
>> http://bretjohnson.us/
>>
>> There is also this proprietary blob from Panasonic:
>>
>> http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-usb.html
>>
>> I haven't tested any of the above, sorry.
>>
>>
>> Mateusz
>>
>>
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Hey All,

Thank you for the informative replies.  There just may be a new FreeDOS
application coming soon.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks again.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Karen Lewellen]

I can speak to the Panasonic one, it is fantastic!
At least in ms dos 7.1 which I use instead of freedos.
Karen


On Sun, 1 Nov 2015, Mateusz Viste wrote:

> On 01/11/2015 02:05, Mark LaPierre wrote:
>> Does FreeDOS support USB ports?
>
> FreeDOS, as any other DOS I know, doesn't. But there are drivers out
> there that can talk to xHCI controllers and map mass storage USB media
> to DOS drives.
>
> Bret kindly provides such drivers under an open-source license:
>
> http://bretjohnson.us/
>
> There is also this proprietary blob from Panasonic:
>
> http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-usb.html
>
> I haven't tested any of the above, sorry.
>
>
> Mateusz
>
>
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[Freedos-user] USB

[Mark LaPierre]

Does FreeDOS support USB ports?

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and sound card emulation on FreeDOS

[Thomas Mueller]

from Guillem:

Hello,
 I am currently considering the possibility of dualbooting my Windows computer 
 with FreeDOS. I have the resources to do so (FreeDOS installation CD image 
 which I can burn to a flashdrive, 512mb unallocated space on my
 main drive which I will make a FAT32 partition on, etc) but I�\200\231m 
 only struggling with two problems. I haven�\200\231t found the answer to 
 them online so I dedcided to post here.
 My first problem is that I need a serial port to use my computer in FreeDOS. 
 The reason is that I am completely blind. As such, I use a program called a 
 screen reader, which essentially does what it�\200\231s name
 suggests, read the screen. To read it, it uses a separate tool called a 
 speech synthesizer. A speech synthesizer basically turns any text into speech 
 (most of the time, anyway :D). On a modern system, such as Windows,
 there are dozens of software speech synthesizers out there (eSpeak, 
 vocalizer, ETI-Eloquence) which I can use with my screenreader. DOS, though, 
 had very few software synthesizers, and the ones which were available
 weren�\200\231t usable via an external screenreader. People used external 
 speech synthesizers, attached to their computers via the serial port. I 
 myself own a quite old notetaker for the blind, the �\200\234Braille �\200
\231n
 Speak 2000�\200\235, which has a built-in speech synthesizer. My problem 
 is, though, that being a quite modern HP computer made and bought in 2014, it 
 does not have a serial port. Under windows 8.1, I have used a Prolifi
c
 PL-2303 adapter. It works flawlessly and I can use all of the serial features 
 of the Braille �\200\231n Speak with it. The thing is, I haven�\200\231t 
 seen any mention to this working under FreeDOS. Could anyone here tel
 l meif it is possible to use one of these adapters?

 This brings me to my second question. The sound card. I am aware that windows 
 pretty much blocks out the PC speaker, even though I think my computer has 
 one. FreeDOS does allow it, I believe. What I don�\200\231t know is

 if I�\200\231ll be able to actually somehow emulate a sound card, possibly 
 a Sound Blaster compatible one, with the integrated realtek one my PC has. 
 This is also quite important for me since most of the games that
 I�\200\231ll run under FreeDOS need the sound card to emit sound.

 I hope someone here can point me in the right direction. I would really 
 appreciate any help that you may be able to provide me with this.

 Thanks in advance.

There are USB-to-serial adapters that plug into a USB port on the computer and 
have a 9-pin serial port on the other end, but I don't know how these work in 
FreeDOS.

You could look on tigerdirect.com or startech.com .

You might want to consider Linux instead of, or in addition to, FreeDOS.  Linux 
offers better, more modern, hardware support that FreeDOS.

I typed this message a couple days ago, don't see it on the FreeDOS list, so 
may have forgotten to send it.

Tom


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Javier De La Rosa Perigault]

Para : GuillemDe    : Javier De La Rosa Perigault           e-mail : 
jdlrp...@yahoo.com
Hola:A.  Necesito hacer un disco multi-partición, que por lo menos contenga     
 una partición con el equivalente de MSDOS 6.22, y una partición       de Linux.
      Me puede ayudar ?
Gracias,Javier De La Rosa Perigaultx 

 On Tuesday, January 13, 2015 5:13 AM, Guillem guilevi2...@gmail.com 
wrote:
   

 I’ve tried DOSemu with the Orca screenreader before. it could read the screen 
in terminal or dumb mode, but for some reason, when new text scrolled into the 
screen, the screenreader read the whole screen. Haven’t had a chance to try 
this with speakup, and right now I doubt I could anyway since I somehow busted 
my speech dispatcher and my Orca’s pretty much dead.
I believe VMWare is trying to emulate a Sound Blaster 16, or that’s what it 
says on the vmx file. I haven’t looked up much info about the soundcard under 
DOS though. What I do know is that VMWare does try to use a PC speaker, and 
windows doesn’t let it do that. For most vintage audiogames the PC speaker 
beeps are used to help you aim so they’re sort of important.


 On 12 Jan 2015, at 20:24, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote:
 
 
 Hi Guillem,
 
 In response to Eric, I have tried DOSemu and I did manage to get the
 serial ports to work. I had a few problems with it, though. Neither the
 PC speaker or the Sound Blaster worked. To be honest I’m not sure if the
 netbook I was running it on has a PC speaker anyways.
 
 Normally, Dosemu uses the soundcard of your PC, not the
 built-in speaker, and emulates a Sound Blaster for DOS.
 
 Another one of my problems with DOSemu is that, for some reason, when i
 tried to use my DOS screenreader's review mode, the either the emulator
 or the reader crashed. I can’t get out of review mode and my only way
 out is by exiting the emulator. I could of course use terminal or dumb
 mode but those don’t like some of the games I’ve tried, such as Eamon
 Deluxe.
 
 My suggestion was to use not a screen reader for DOS, but
 to use a screen reader for Linux. When you then run a DOS
 game in dosemu, the screen reader should be able to read
 that, too. It can help to use the text-only mode of dosemu,
 which is admittedly less cool than the graphical xdosemu.
 
 My most stable alternative right now is my Windows 3.1 VMWare virtual
 machine, which actually works pretty well both in DOS and Windows mode,
 
 Interesting idea!
 
 except for the sound blaster which only works inside Windows. I might
 postpone the dualboot until a better alternative is available since I
 don’t think I’ll purchase a new laptop just for this.
 
 The so-called Sound Blaster PCI and Sound Blaster Live came
 with their own DOS software which emulates a Sound Blaster:
 Despite the name, those PCI sound cards actually have more
 AC97 style hardware, so their DOS support only works through
 their DOS TSR driver which seems to work quite okay once
 you get it to work... Of course this does not help you for
 a laptop, as you cannot exchange the soundcard there. Also,
 I am not aware of DOS SoundBlaster emulation drivers for USB
 sound sticks. Beyond the suggested dosemu and dosbox trick.
 
 Regards, Eric
 
 
 
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Guillem]

I’ve tried DOSemu with the Orca screenreader before. it could read the screen 
in terminal or dumb mode, but for some reason, when new text scrolled into the 
screen, the screenreader read the whole screen. Haven’t had a chance to try 
this with speakup, and right now I doubt I could anyway since I somehow busted 
my speech dispatcher and my Orca’s pretty much dead.
I believe VMWare is trying to emulate a Sound Blaster 16, or that’s what it 
says on the vmx file. I haven’t looked up much info about the soundcard under 
DOS though. What I do know is that VMWare does try to use a PC speaker, and 
windows doesn’t let it do that. For most vintage audiogames the PC speaker 
beeps are used to help you aim so they’re sort of important.


 On 12 Jan 2015, at 20:24, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote:
 
 
 Hi Guillem,
 
 In response to Eric, I have tried DOSemu and I did manage to get the
 serial ports to work. I had a few problems with it, though. Neither the
 PC speaker or the Sound Blaster worked. To be honest I’m not sure if the
 netbook I was running it on has a PC speaker anyways.
 
 Normally, Dosemu uses the soundcard of your PC, not the
 built-in speaker, and emulates a Sound Blaster for DOS.
 
 Another one of my problems with DOSemu is that, for some reason, when i
 tried to use my DOS screenreader's review mode, the either the emulator
 or the reader crashed. I can’t get out of review mode and my only way
 out is by exiting the emulator. I could of course use terminal or dumb
 mode but those don’t like some of the games I’ve tried, such as Eamon
 Deluxe.
 
 My suggestion was to use not a screen reader for DOS, but
 to use a screen reader for Linux. When you then run a DOS
 game in dosemu, the screen reader should be able to read
 that, too. It can help to use the text-only mode of dosemu,
 which is admittedly less cool than the graphical xdosemu.
 
 My most stable alternative right now is my Windows 3.1 VMWare virtual
 machine, which actually works pretty well both in DOS and Windows mode,
 
 Interesting idea!
 
 except for the sound blaster which only works inside Windows. I might
 postpone the dualboot until a better alternative is available since I
 don’t think I’ll purchase a new laptop just for this.
 
 The so-called Sound Blaster PCI and Sound Blaster Live came
 with their own DOS software which emulates a Sound Blaster:
 Despite the name, those PCI sound cards actually have more
 AC97 style hardware, so their DOS support only works through
 their DOS TSR driver which seems to work quite okay once
 you get it to work... Of course this does not help you for
 a laptop, as you cannot exchange the soundcard there. Also,
 I am not aware of DOS SoundBlaster emulation drivers for USB
 sound sticks. Beyond the suggested dosemu and dosbox trick.
 
 Regards, Eric
 
 
 
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Eric Auer]

(forwarding from Guillem)

In response to Eric, I have tried DOSemu and I did manage to get the
serial ports to work. I had a few problems with it, though. Neither the
PC speaker or the Sound Blaster worked. To be honest I’m not sure if the
netbook I was running it on has a PC speaker anyways.
Another one of my problems with DOSemu is that, for some reason, when i
tried to use my DOS screenreader's review mode, the either the emulator
or the reader crashed. I can’t get out of review mode and my only way
out is by exiting the emulator. I could of course use terminal or dumb
mode but those don’t like some of the games I’ve tried, such as Eamon
Deluxe.
My most stable alternative right now is my Windows 3.1 VMWare virtual
machine, which actually works pretty well both in DOS and Windows mode,
except for the sound blaster which only works inside Windows. I might
postpone the dualboot until a better alternative is available since I
don’t think I’ll purchase a new laptop just for this.

Thank you.

 On 11 Jan 2015, at 22:19, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote:
 
 
 Hi Guillem,
 
 for another solution of your screen reader problem, you could
 use Linux (for which free screen readers and Braille drivers,
 both serial and USB are available) and run your old DOS tools
 in Dosemu or Dosbox inside Linux. That will emulate a classic
 Sound Blaster for DOS, no matter what your actual hardware is
 using for the sound. Would that be an option for you?
 
 Regards, Eric
 
 




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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Eric Auer]

Hi Guillem,

 In response to Eric, I have tried DOSemu and I did manage to get the
 serial ports to work. I had a few problems with it, though. Neither the
 PC speaker or the Sound Blaster worked. To be honest I’m not sure if the
 netbook I was running it on has a PC speaker anyways.

Normally, Dosemu uses the soundcard of your PC, not the
built-in speaker, and emulates a Sound Blaster for DOS.

 Another one of my problems with DOSemu is that, for some reason, when i
 tried to use my DOS screenreader's review mode, the either the emulator
 or the reader crashed. I can’t get out of review mode and my only way
 out is by exiting the emulator. I could of course use terminal or dumb
 mode but those don’t like some of the games I’ve tried, such as Eamon
 Deluxe.

My suggestion was to use not a screen reader for DOS, but
to use a screen reader for Linux. When you then run a DOS
game in dosemu, the screen reader should be able to read
that, too. It can help to use the text-only mode of dosemu,
which is admittedly less cool than the graphical xdosemu.

 My most stable alternative right now is my Windows 3.1 VMWare virtual
 machine, which actually works pretty well both in DOS and Windows mode,

Interesting idea!

 except for the sound blaster which only works inside Windows. I might
 postpone the dualboot until a better alternative is available since I
 don’t think I’ll purchase a new laptop just for this.

The so-called Sound Blaster PCI and Sound Blaster Live came
with their own DOS software which emulates a Sound Blaster:
Despite the name, those PCI sound cards actually have more
AC97 style hardware, so their DOS support only works through
their DOS TSR driver which seems to work quite okay once
you get it to work... Of course this does not help you for
a laptop, as you cannot exchange the soundcard there. Also,
I am not aware of DOS SoundBlaster emulation drivers for USB
sound sticks. Beyond the suggested dosemu and dosbox trick.

Regards, Eric



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[Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Guillem]

Hello,
I am currently considering the possibility of dualbooting my Windows computer 
with FreeDOS. I have the resources to do so (FreeDOS installation CD image 
which I can burn to a flashdrive, 512mb unallocated space on my main drive 
which I will make a FAT32 partition on, etc) but I’m only struggling with two 
problems. I haven’t found the answer to them online so I dedcided to post here.
My first problem is that I need a serial port to use my computer in FreeDOS. 
The reason is that I am completely blind. As such, I use a program called a 
screen reader, which essentially does what it’s name suggests, read the screen. 
To read it, it uses a separate tool called a speech synthesizer. A speech 
synthesizer basically turns any text into speech (most of the time, anyway :D). 
On a modern system, such as Windows, there are dozens of software speech 
synthesizers out there (eSpeak, vocalizer, ETI-Eloquence) which I can use with 
my screenreader. DOS, though, had very few software synthesizers, and the ones 
which were available weren’t usable via an external screenreader. People used 
external speech synthesizers, attached to their computers via the serial port. 
I myself own a quite old notetaker for the blind, the “Braille ’n Speak 2000”, 
which has a built-in speech synthesizer. My problem is, though, that being a 
quite modern HP computer made and bought in 2014, it does not have a serial 
port. Under windows 8.1, I have used a Prolific PL-2303 adapter. It works 
flawlessly and I can use all of the serial features of the Braille ’n Speak 
with it. The thing is, I haven’t seen any mention to this working under 
FreeDOS. Could anyone here tell me if it is possible to use one of these 
adapters?

This brings me to my second question. The sound card. I am aware that windows 
pretty much blocks out the PC speaker, even though I think my computer has one. 
FreeDOS does allow it, I believe. What I don’t know is if I’ll be able to 
actually somehow emulate a sound card, possibly a Sound Blaster compatible one, 
with the integrated realtek one my PC has. This is also quite important for me 
since most of the games that I’ll run under FreeDOS need the sound card to emit 
sound.

I hope someone here can point me in the right direction. I would really 
appreciate any help that you may be able to provide me with this.

Thanks in advance.
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Matej Horvat]

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 14:39:29 +0100, Guillem guilevi2...@gmail.com wrote:

 My problem is,
 though, that being a quite modern HP computer made and bought in 2014,
 it does not have a serial port. Under windows 8.1, I have used a
 Prolific PL-2303 adapter. It works flawlessly and I can use all of the
 serial features of the Braille ’n Speak with it. The thing is, I haven’t
 seen any mention to this working under FreeDOS. Could anyone here tell
 me if it is possible to use one of these adapters?

The DOSUSB drivers by Georg Potthast include a driver which claims to  
support adapters with Prolific chipsets. I don't have such an adapter  
myself, so I don't know how well it works.

 This brings me to my second question. The sound card. I am aware that  
 windows pretty much blocks out the PC speaker, even though I think my  
 computer has one. FreeDOS does allow it, I believe. What I don’t know is  
 if I’ll be able to actually somehow emulate a sound card, possibly a  
 Sound Blaster compatible one, with the integrated realtek one my PC has.

There is a program called VSB which emulates a Sound Blaster and sends the  
output to the PC speaker or a Covox Speech Thing (which despite its name  
is only a digital-to-analog converter connected to the parallel port).  
However, it is only compatible with real mode software, and even then not  
all of it. The quality, of course, is not that great, but it is probably  
good enough for speech.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB to serial adapters and soundcard emulation on FreeDOS

[Don Flowers]

I think you might need to consider a vintage laptop. I have FreeDOS
installed on a Compaq Armada 1750 and using Mpxplay, the sound is amazing
through front/top firing speakers with side bass ports. I have yet to  get
Qview configured properly, for sound, but since that is the case with every
PC I own, it must be me. The Compaq Armada has a PII 366 processor, 320MB
RAM, 800x600 graphics, ESS 1869 sound card, serial and parallel ports,
video out port, Keyboard in, PCMCIA II (works great with wired D-Link card
for FDNPKG install)  and USB 1.1 as well as infrared transfer capabilities.

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Matej Horvat matej.hor...@guest.arnes.si
wrote:

 On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 14:39:29 +0100, Guillem guilevi2...@gmail.com wrote:

  My problem is,
  though, that being a quite modern HP computer made and bought in 2014,
  it does not have a serial port. Under windows 8.1, I have used a
  Prolific PL-2303 adapter. It works flawlessly and I can use all of the
  serial features of the Braille ’n Speak with it. The thing is, I haven’t
  seen any mention to this working under FreeDOS. Could anyone here tell
  me if it is possible to use one of these adapters?

 The DOSUSB drivers by Georg Potthast include a driver which claims to
 support adapters with Prolific chipsets. I don't have such an adapter
 myself, so I don't know how well it works.

  This brings me to my second question. The sound card. I am aware that
  windows pretty much blocks out the PC speaker, even though I think my
  computer has one. FreeDOS does allow it, I believe. What I don’t know is
  if I’ll be able to actually somehow emulate a sound card, possibly a
  Sound Blaster compatible one, with the integrated realtek one my PC has.

 There is a program called VSB which emulates a Sound Blaster and sends the
 output to the PC speaker or a Covox Speech Thing (which despite its name
 is only a digital-to-analog converter connected to the parallel port).
 However, it is only compatible with real mode software, and even then not
 all of it. The quality, of course, is not that great, but it is probably
 good enough for speech.


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[Freedos-user] USB boot and hanging.

[kurt godel]

I too have had blinking-cursor-hang;PloP boot manager will often, but not
always succeed in mounting/loading a usb. I suspect that the main problem
with the usb stick is that it often contains
an HPA partition. If the usb truly behaved as a hard drive, you could
eliminate the HPA. When using 'hdparm'  or 'setmax' to remove the HPA/DCO,
you get a message:
bad or missing sense data, and there are no explicit numbers for hidden
vs visible sectors.
Any attempt to force the issue ends in failure; I suspect that the
built in software(some of it malware) on many flash drives is actually mask
programmed onto the flash drive, and
cannot be removed.
  Not long ago, I had purchased five 4GB flash drives with none of that
garbage on them, and they always boot properly; ironically, they cost half
as much as the junk with features built-in.
  BTW, have found the exact same situation on a 16GB sd card.
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB parameters

[Bret Johnson]

Unfortunately, the /X parameter is the only one you can really play with that 
might have any effect.  Sorry about that.

I'm working on updates to all of the USB drivers, but don't have a lot of time 
to devote to it.  Hopefully, the next version will have problems like these 
solved.  In the meantime, you'll probably either need to use Linux or one of 
the other DOS USB drivers.

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[Freedos-user] USB parameters

[Marcos Favero Florence de Barros]

Hi Bret and others,

I have a rather old Olympus digital camera, and I would like to
download its pictures in FreeDOS with the USB cable, but this
isn't working. In fact, it is still worse: it does work, but
only 1 out of 10 times.

(It works in Linux alright, but I take recourse to Linux only
for those things that cannot be done in FreeDOS.)

In a series of tests, the possibilities that the fault is in (1)
motherboard, (2) cable, (3) USB port, or (4) picture memory card
have all been excluded.

I download pictures regularly in FreeDOS from another Olympus
camera with the USB cable. There were problems in the beginning
too, but by trial and error I found a value for the /X parameter
that makes it work reliably.

For the current camera, I tried the same /X trick, but it did
not work. Is there any other parameter or option which I should
try?

Thanks,

Marcos

PS: I remember what you said about the USB architecture being flaky,
so I'm not entertaining overly high hopes with this camera.



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[Freedos-user] usb in dos

[kurt godel]

Trying to make a micro-pupplet to furnish usb functionality in dos;
in this regard, had to edit an initrd.gz which began at 1.9 MB. Working in
mint 14, used extract here
in gui to get initrd from 'initrd.gz. The initrd was 2.7 MB;discarding
that, put the initrd.gz into:
/mnt/casper, to get /mnt/casper/initrd.gz. Then, at the commandline:
gzip -dc /mnt/casper/initrd.gz | cpio -id;
  With absolutely no modifications I repacked it with:
find . | cpio --quiet --dereference -o -H newc | gzip -9  ~/new-initrd.gz.
  To my astonishment the new 'round trip' initrd.gz was more tham thirty
megabytes!!
Am I missing somethimg, or is my mint/cpio/gzip broken?
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB

[Bret Johnson]

 I an loading usbuhci and usbdrive with LH.  They both load low.

All of the USB drivers will load themselves automatically into upper memory if 
it is available -- you do not need to (and, in fact, shouldn't) use LH.  If, 
for some reason, you want them loaded into low memory even if upper memory is 
available, you can use the /LowMemory:Yes option.

Also, USBUHCIL uses less memory than USBUHCI, so you should probably use 
USBUHCIL instead.

 They create eight drive letters, none of which show the plugged
 in device.

Eight drive letters is the default for USBDRIVE, but you can change that with 
the /Drives:# option (where # is the maximum number of drive letters you want 
to allow at the same time).  There are also the /Devices:# and /Disks:# options 
which control various aspects of how many devices you want plugged in at the 
same time.  It's kind of complicated to discuss here -- read the documentation 
(USBINTRO.DOC).

 The current test device is a 1G thumb drive.  Do the drivers have
 a max size?

Not in a generic sense.  The maximum size depends on the hardware, BIOS, and 
specific manufacturer/version of DOS.  A 1G disk should work just fine in 
FreeDOS.

 I am using the included drivers.  I have the drivers from the
 Johnson site which have the same date stamp but are much larger.

I think the ones distributed with FreeDOS are compressed with UPX to make the 
files smaller, but should still run the same way.  The original ones on my web 
site are not compressed.


Your problem more than likely is that you have more than one USB host 
controller.  If you simply install USBUHCIL (or USBUHCI) with no options, it 
only installs for the first USB host controller (Index 0).  A UHCI host 
controller can only have two ports, so when you do this only two of the ports 
are enabled.  Which two those are physically depends on the computer (they may 
be on the front, back, left, right, or not even appear on the outside of the 
computer at all -- they may have some internal device plugged into them, like 
a multi-media card reader, camera, fingerprint reader, etc.).

Try plugging the thumb drive into a different USB port (which may or may not 
work, depending on your hardware configuration).  Or, use USBHOSTS to figure 
out how many UHCI controllers you have, and then try installing USBUHCIL with 
different indexes (use the /Index:# option, where # is the 0-based index 
number) until you find the correct one.

Your problem could be something else, too, but that is the most likely problem.

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB mobile,Broad Band device

[iw2evk]

No usb device like usb wifi pens or usb UMTS exist for a lack of drivers in
dos .only exist older pcmcia 11 mb/sec wifi card (orinoco)
For browser (graphics) you can try 

http://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/downloads/detail?name=DILLODOS_beta2.zipcan=2q=

or UNDER HX EXTENDER owb browser (read carefully this)

http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=7636

Roberto iw2evk



Garry Ricketson wrote:
 
 
 Hello, everyone,
  Dose anyone know if a USB mobile broad band device can be used with
 FreeDos,?
 Also if any other browsers are available? I have been trying with
 ARACHNE, but no luck, If anyone can help on this, it would be greatly
 appreciated. I am using a older computer, also with a alternate version,
 of xubuntu,(linux), and the broad band device dose work, however it would
 be nice to get it working with FreeDos,on my dos partition if that is
 possible,..
 
 Thank you and have a Good Day!From Garry
 
 
 
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Re: [Freedos-user] USB mobile,Broad Band device

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 7:55 AM, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote:

 No usb device like usb wifi pens or usb UMTS exist for a lack of drivers
 in
 dos .only exist older pcmcia 11 mb/sec wifi card (orinoco)

 As mentioned earlier, you can go a bit more wired:
 Even simple broadband routers like Edimax 3G-6200N
 (30 Euro?) today allow you to plug in UMTS / 3G /
 HSDPA / CDMA USB modem sticks, so they connect to
 the outside world through either the stick or DSL
 and connect to your computer through normal network
 cable (LAN / RJ45) or WLAN / WiFi (IEEE 802.11 with
 various variants). Of course this means you may need
 cable between the router and your DOS computer, but
 at least it allows you to get DOS online via UMTS,
 even if neither UMTS nor WLAN drivers are available.
 If you are lucky and have WLAN drivers but no UMTS
 drivers for DOS, you do not even need the cable :-)

Don't forget emulation. Sadly, I never got FDNPKG to work under
VirtualBox (oddly), though Mateusz swears it works for him (and DOSEMU
with appropriate [arcane] settings). At least with emulation you can
use your laptop wirelessly, if needed (or desired or if running a
cable from router is too long).

I know emulation isn't a perfect solution by any means, not to mention
slowness and bugs, but sometimes it works okay.

 For browser (graphics) you can try

 http://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/downloads/detail?name=DILLODOS_beta2.zipcan=2q=

 In other words, a DOS port of the small but
 modern browser Dillo :-)

Yes, Dillo is excellent. Though I do wonder whether Georg's build or
whats-his-face's [EDIT: Benjamin Johnson's] DPlus build (June 2012) is
ultimately preferred. (But I get the impression that DPlus will see
fewer updates, if any, for the foreseeable future. And similarly Georg
is always busy with new projects, heh. Still, awesome progress so far,
so I'm definitely not complaining. Having a port of Dillo at all is no
small miracle.)

http://dplus-browser.sourceforge.net/

 or UNDER HX EXTENDER owb browser (read carefully this)

 http://www.bttr-software.de/forum/forum_entry.php?id=7636

 Both are probably much better than classic Arachne,
 although the latter might be nice on 486ish PC if
 you install it on ramdisk to make speed acceptable.

I wouldn't bother with OWB. What advantages does it have (if any)?
Seems much less convenient than Dillo or Arachne. BTW, Ray Andrews had
a fork of Arachne with some cleanups, but I'm not sure how polished
and stable it is. I know he could use some help (assuming he's still
working on it), but it was yet another thing to do (that I wasn't
really qualified for anyways, as always). But it sounded interesting
at least (and is mirrored on Glenn's main site, IIRC).

BTW, Mik's old Elinks port worked pretty well in FreeDOS too. And, to
a lesser extent, Lynx will (mostly) work if you compile from sources
(or use an older build).

The real biggest problems nowadays are all the new web technologies:
 Flash, HTML5/CSS, Javascript, Unicode, etc. (It used to be all we had
to worry about was image formats, tables, frames, etc. Ah, the older /
simpler / crappier days.)

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Re: [Freedos-user] USB mobile,Broad Band device

[Bret Johnson]

You could try this, at least as a place to start:

http://lspppacm.narod.ru/


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Re: [Freedos-user] USB mobile,Broad Band device

[Garry Ricketson]

Hello, everyone,
 Dose anyone know if a USB mobile broad band device can be used with FreeDos,?
Also if any other browsers are available? I have been trying with ARACHNE, 
but no luck, If anyone can help on this, it would be greatly appreciated. I am 
using a older computer, also with a alternate version, of xubuntu,(linux), and 
the broad band device dose work, however it would be nice to get it working 
with FreeDos,on my dos partition if that is possible,..

Thank you and have a Good Day!From Garry


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