Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
I got an old laptop with Windows 2000 Professional (NT). I will now change the file system to FAT16, and install FreeDOS Cool :-) Would such drivers for Windows be of any use in FreeDOS? MSVCRT.DLL, other MSVC*.DLL, CRTDLL.DLL, GLUE32.DLL ... maybe ReaCTOS will replace them one day? WHINE can't :-( But no drivers. See above. All the DOS apps I use run in a console window under 2K with NTVDM. I am *not* a gamer, and don't run DOS games that use graphics and write to video memory. All of my stuff is character mode Obsessed by NTVDM ... this topic always generates huge discussions :-( -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 6:11 AM, dos386 dos...@gmail.com wrote: See above. All the DOS apps I use run in a console window under 2K with NTVDM. I am *not* a gamer, and don't run DOS games that use graphics and write to video memory. All of my stuff is character mode Obsessed by NTVDM ... this topic always generates huge discussions :-( It Works For Me, but as mentioned above, I'm not a gamer, and don't do the sorts of things in DOS NT won't let you do, NTVDM provides a virtual DOS environment fro running 16 bit apps. When you run a DOS app, NTVDM is run, and a copy of COMMAND.COM is spawned to run the DOS app. All of the character mode stuff I run works fine. The thing to remember is that a app run in NTVDM is a process running in a 32 bit environment. If you shell out od the DOS app to a command line, you're t talking to CMD.EXE, not COMMAND.COM One of the old DOS apps I still run is Eric Meyer's VDE. VDE is an editor that began under CP/M as a single-file alternative to the WordStar word processor, Eric later moved development to MS-DOS. VDE is freeware these days, but still maintained and supported. VDE has an Alt-R command for shelling to external processes. Press Alt-R and you get a command line in VDE. Enter a command on that line and press Enter and VDE attempts to run what you entered. Just press Enter and VDE spawns a shell. The shell is CMD, not COMMAND. I discovered that you could use the CMD START builtin to do things like run a process in a new window from within VDE. Exit the process in the new window, and you were back in the VDE session. This provides the ability to use other apps called from VDE to perform operations on the text you are editing that VDE itself can't do, Win2K/WinXP both have AUTOEXEC.NT and CONFIG.NT files. These are used to configure the NTVDM environment. By default they don't do anything, but you can customize them as desired. If you do that, it affects *all* NTVDM sessions. You have to be careful about this. If you run your DOS app from a batch file, settings in AUTOEXEC.NT will override settings in the batch file, which is probably not what you want. This bit me till I figured out what was going on and reserved app specific stuff like PATH for the batch file and didn't try to diddle it in AUTOEXEC.NT. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- Try New Relic Now We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, if you're lucky enough to have Win2k installed atop FAT32, you can probably just use a DOS utilitity like FIPS or PRESZ134 to resize for you. Hmmm, well, you obviously don't need a separate partition for DOS in that case. ;-) Lucky? One of the things I was *happy* about in moving from Win98SE to Win2K Pro was being able to use NTFS. IT's far more robust, and supports the concept of file ownership and permissions. (It supports hardlinks and symlinks, too.) I've spent way to much time over the years dealing with trashed FAT file systems. CHKDSK could assign orphaned clusters to files, but then what? Mostly, they'd be unusable and require deletion. When I've had NTFS filesystem issues, CHKDSK has matter of factly recovered orphaned orphaned clusters, assigned them to the files they belonged to, and recreated the directory that had problems. The only time I saw that not happen was in the case where a directory entry happened to be sitting on a bad disk block. You *can* run 2K on FAT32. I *wouldn't*. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
Hi, On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 9:54 PM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:03 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros fav...@mpcnet.com.br wrote: I got an old laptop with Windows 2000 Professional (NT). I will now change the file system to FAT16, and install FreeDOS. Can't you dual boot?? I'm fairly sure you can. I have an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook p2110, It came with WinXP SP2, I swapped the 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SOs failed laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K got a 20GB slice, running on NTFS, off-topic BTW, I never did understand why Vista on up required so much more than 2K or XP. I mean, I know XP SP3 added a lot (1 GB? so total is around 2.5??), but it's still vastly smaller than typical 12-16 GB install of Vista or 7. I've heard some say, You can slim it down to 7 GB, but I still wonder what is wasting all that space. A GB is a lot of room. (Maybe it's all printer drivers? Language files? Didn't Snow Leopard or whatever remove a lot of those in lieu of grabbing from network if needed?) Actually, a quick check of c:\windows\fonts shows that even that takes 300+ MB these days! Though I shouldn't be too surprised, even Win95 was like 18 overformatted floppies. Arguably, you don't need most of those at all. off-topic Ubuntu and Puppy got 8GB slices on ext4, and FreeDOS got a 2GB slice formatted FAT32, Good, because FAT16 is horrible on anything over 512 MB. Not slow, just wasteful. with a small raw partition shared between Ubuntu and Puppy as a swap partition. Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's slices and see each other's files. I found an open source driver that lets 2K read/write the ext4 slices the Linux installs live on. 2K and Linux can both see and read/write the FAT32 slice. FreeDOS can't see anything else, but I don't care because it has no need to. I consider this a minor flaw in DOS, but I guess most people (including me!) don't have the time or energy or skills to write a network redirector driver for another file system. (Paragon had a shareware one, IIRC.) Even LTOOLS and Odi's LFN Tools don't work for me on my system (gotta love bugs ... NOT!). TestDisk isn't really the same thing, but it seems to more or less work. I used that a tiny bit fairly recently. I *did* have fun getting FreeDOS to actually boot from Grub2, and had to fiddle for a while before I got it to do so. (Alas, I no longer recall just what fiddle did the trick.) It worked fine till I had to reinstall 2K to fix Windows related issues. That broke booting FreeDOS from Grub. I could still run all of the DOS stuff on the FreeDOS slice in an NTVDM under 2K, so it was an annoyance but not crippling. GRUB 2? The new version? Ugh. IIRC, it's much more complicated, but I guess that's debatable. I guess it's unavoidable with UEFI and tons of quirky OSes that require handholding. Part of the problem is having to use the MBR to boot a separate program (on its own partition?) just to boot the real OS! As for Windows hosing other OSes, it's probably less inept and sinister than it sounds. Probably they just don't want to deal with tons of tech support calls about their OS not booting. (It's implied here that most people only care about Windows, which is probably mostly true.) It really shouldn't be hard for someone somewhere to repair this for you, Dennis. As long as the FreeDOS partition is active, primary FAT with a working boot sector, it should be possible (and easy, famous last words) to chainload something to it. I don't know. Quite honestly, multi-booting (or just booting in general) is an arcane, very very difficult black box. There are too many competing OSes, so they just can't (or won't) get along very easily. I went with 2K over XP because 2K is less resource hungry. The Lifebook has a whopping 256MB of RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off the top by the Transmeta CPU for code morphing. On the 2K reinstall, I was able to get what Win2K itself used booted to a desktop to about 85MB, and it actually booted with reasonable speed. (The box as I got it with XP Pro took 8 minutes to boot, and was frozen snail slow once it had.) Yuck. Anyways, as mentioned before, XP is still mostly lean. I think you'd have to disable some stuff via msconfig. Though obviously you can't run behemoths like Firefox (comfortably) on such small RAM machines. 2K was actually more or less usable, as were Ubuntu and Puppy. FreeDOS flew. I should hope so! ;-) I installed FreeDOS on FAT32 and had no problems. I don't see a reason to go FAT16. No, me either, esp. not for 2 GB. Maybe for 512 or less (to avoid tons of slack waste). There are some rare, low-level, third-party DOS tools that won't work on FAT32, but for the most part, you shouldn't have to worry about that. P.S. Actually, some people say that Win2k was pretty similar to XP,
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
Hi, On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 12:18 PM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, if you're lucky enough to have Win2k installed atop FAT32 Lucky? One of the things I was *happy* about in moving from Win98SE to Win2K Pro was being able to use NTFS. IT's far more robust, and supports the concept of file ownership and permissions. (It supports hardlinks and symlinks, too.) NT 4 wasn't the same as NT 5 and NT 6. They all (IIRC) used different variants of NTFS anyways. So it's not like there is only one universal standard. Only with Vista were symlinks fully supported. So that leaves out 2K (except with third-party hacks, perhaps). Yes, it adds features and tries to have security. But that's really only partially useful (e.g. over network or against accidental destruction). You can still break things via booting other OSes, but only if you have access to the physical machine. It's also less useful for a single user setup with minimal network access. And BTW, NTFS needs much higher requirements than other file systems, so it's not suitable for all devices, e.g. flash drives (exFAT). I've spent way to much time over the years dealing with trashed FAT file systems. CHKDSK could assign orphaned clusters to files, but then what? Mostly, they'd be unusable and require deletion. When I've had NTFS filesystem issues, CHKDSK has matter of factly recovered orphaned orphaned clusters, assigned them to the files they belonged to, and recreated the directory that had problems. The only time I saw that not happen was in the case where a directory entry happened to be sitting on a bad disk block. Despite its superiority, NTFS still needs to be defragmented semi-regularly. And recovery is not guaranteed. Yes, it's journaling, so that's good, but it's not perfect by any stretch. Though I'm not really saying I prefer FAT, but it is what it is. (A real minimalist wouldn't use a file system at all, e.g. Forth blocks. You don't need files just to compute. It's all just 1s and 0s on the hard drive anyways.) You *can* run 2K on FAT32. I *wouldn't*. It's moot because Vista (and successors) removed that feature. -- AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 9:54 PM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: I have an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook p2110, It came with WinXP SP2, I swapped the 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SOs failed laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K got a 20GB slice, running on NTFS, off-topic BTW, I never did understand why Vista on up required so much more than 2K or XP. I mean, I know XP SP3 added a lot (1 GB? so total is around 2.5??), but it's still vastly smaller than typical 12-16 GB install of Vista or 7. I've heard some say, You can slim it down to 7 GB, but I still wonder what is wasting all that space. A GB is a lot of room. (Maybe it's all printer drivers? Language files? Didn't Snow Leopard or whatever remove a lot of those in lieu of grabbing from network if needed?) Actually, a quick check of c:\windows\fonts shows that even that takes 300+ MB these days! Each Windows version wanted more resources than the previous release. The bare minimum RAM I'd want for XP is 512MB. The Lifebook was a pass along from an owner who has upgraded. It apparently came from Fujistu with XP, and SP2 was a user update. SP2 did increase resource requirements. Reviews I turned up about the Lifebook were generally positive when it got released, but I can't imagine why.. Though I shouldn't be too surprised, even Win95 was like 18 overformatted floppies. Arguably, you don't need most of those at all. off-topic I no longer waste emotion on the issue. Current OSes assume you have current hardware to run them on, and for the most part that's a correct assumption. Ubuntu and Puppy got 8GB slices on ext4, and FreeDOS got a 2GB slice formatted FAT32, Good, because FAT16 is horrible on anything over 512 MB. Not slow, just wasteful. Since FAT16 has a hard limit of 65,556 clusters, the larger the partition is, the bigger the cluster will be, up to a 2GB maximum volume size. Since I wanted a 2GB volume for FreeDOS, I want FAT32. Who needs a one-line file taking 32K? with a small raw partition shared between Ubuntu and Puppy as a swap partition. Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's slices and see each other's files. I found an open source driver that lets 2K read/write the ext4 slices the Linux installs live on. 2K and Linux can both see and read/write the FAT32 slice. FreeDOS can't see anything else, but I don't care because it has no need to. I consider this a minor flaw in DOS, but I guess most people (including me!) don't have the time or energy or skills to write a network redirector driver for another file system. (Paragon had a shareware one, IIRC.) Back when DOS was the main OS, it wasn't an issue. You were highly unlikely to *have* another file system on a different partition that you would want to see from DOS. I suppose you *could* write drivers to let a DOS installation see NTFS and ext2/3/4 slices, but why bother? You are unlikely to be able to do anything with the files on those slices even if DOS can see them. And drivers you did write would take RAM DOS apps might need. Like I said, I have no need to see the other slices from FreeDOS, and don't care that I can't. Even LTOOLS and Odi's LFN Tools don't work for me on my system (gotta love bugs ... NOT!). TestDisk isn't really the same thing, but it seems to more or less work. I used that a tiny bit fairly recently. I'm quite fond of testdisk. It does a superb job of handling issues where a partition table got trashed. It uses low-level raw disk reads, and doesn't *care* what the file system is because access is below the file system level on raw partitions. I *did* have fun getting FreeDOS to actually boot from Grub2, and had to fiddle for a while before I got it to do so. (Alas, I no longer recall just what fiddle did the trick.) It worked fine till I had to reinstall 2K to fix Windows related issues. That broke booting FreeDOS from Grub. I could still run all of the DOS stuff on the FreeDOS slice in an NTVDM under 2K, so it was an annoyance but not crippling. GRUB 2? The new version? Ugh. IIRC, it's much more complicated, but I guess that's debatable. I guess it's unavoidable with UEFI and tons of quirky OSes that require handholding. Part of the problem is having to use the MBR to boot a separate program (on its own partition?) just to boot the real OS! Grub2 was what came with the Linux systems I was installing. I haven't had major issues dealing with it. As for Windows hosing other OSes, it's probably less inept and sinister than it sounds. Probably they just don't want to deal with tons of tech support calls about their OS not booting. (It's implied here that most people only care about Windows, which is probably mostly true.) Doing a clean re-install of 2K meant wiping the partition it was on and doing a clean install from scratch. That rewrote the boot sector and
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 12:18 PM, dmccunney dennis.mccun...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: Actually, if you're lucky enough to have Win2k installed atop FAT32 Lucky? One of the things I was *happy* about in moving from Win98SE to Win2K Pro was being able to use NTFS. IT's far more robust, and supports the concept of file ownership and permissions. (It supports hardlinks and symlinks, too.) NT 4 wasn't the same as NT 5 and NT 6. They all (IIRC) used different variants of NTFS anyways. So it's not like there is only one universal standard. Only with Vista were symlinks fully supported. So that leaves out 2K (except with third-party hacks, perhaps). Each added things. Win2K/XP uses NTFS5. That supports hard inks out of the box, though the functionality is not exposed by default, and you need MS resource kit or third-party tools to use it. Symlinks are available on Vista/Win7, but I found a driver that adds them to XP, and turns out to work under 2K, too. Yes, it adds features and tries to have security. But that's really only partially useful (e.g. over network or against accidental destruction). You can still break things via booting other OSes, but only if you have access to the physical machine. It's also less useful for a single user setup with minimal network access. Added security is useful on the local machine, too. NTFS supports the ideal of different users having different permissions, and you may not be the only person that uses a machine. And BTW, NTFS needs much higher requirements than other file systems, so it's not suitable for all devices, e.g. flash drives (exFAT). It's *possible* to format a flash drive as NTFS. But since the point of flash drives is using them on different machines, you probably don't want to. NTFS doesn't add anything you need for that usage. I've spent way to much time over the years dealing with trashed FAT file systems. CHKDSK could assign orphaned clusters to files, but then what? Mostly, they'd be unusable and require deletion. When I've had NTFS filesystem issues, CHKDSK has matter of factly recovered orphaned clusters, assigned them to the files they belonged to, and recreated the directory that had problems. The only time I saw that not happen was in the case where a directory entry happened to be sitting on a bad disk block. Despite its superiority, NTFS still needs to be defragmented semi-regularly. And recovery is not guaranteed. Yes, it's journaling, so that's good, but it's not perfect by any stretch. Though I'm not really saying I prefer FAT, but it is what it is. (A real minimalist wouldn't use a file system at all, e.g. Forth blocks. You don't need files just to compute. It's all just 1s and 0s on the hard drive anyways.) *Every* file system is likely to need defragging at some point. NTFS is fragmentation resistant, but cannot eliminate it. For that matter, one of the goals of ext4 on Linux is to support eventual defragmentation tools. And no, recovery is not guaranteed: hardware problems can hose you. But NTFS is less likely to *get* corrupted, and it it does, it's a lot more likely to be recoverable. You *can* run 2K on FAT32. I *wouldn't*. It's moot because Vista (and successors) removed that feature. It's not moot if you *are* running 2K. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
El 16/05/2013 07:18 p.m., Marcos Favero Florence de Barros escribió: Hi, I got an old laptop with Windows 2000 Professional (NT). I will now change the file system to FAT16, and install FreeDOS. However, before erasing Windows, I'm wondering whether there are files, such as drivers or some such thing, which I should keep in order to use with FreeDOS. Would such drivers for Windows be of any use in FreeDOS? If so, which ones? Marcos First check with a freedos live-cd if hard drive remains accesible. If hard drive is higher than 8 Gb you will need to make partition. If you have a big hard drive, I would prefer dual boot linux-freedos -- AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
Hi, I got an old laptop with Windows 2000 Professional (NT). I will now change the file system to FAT16, and install FreeDOS. Can't you dual boot?? [..] Search Google for boot.ini or such. I did, and found the procedure much too complicated. In fact, the reason why I use FreeDOS in the first place is to avoid unnecessary complexity. DOS is not simple, but it is certainly less overwhelming than Windows -- and does not change radically every 3 years or so. I do have a computer with Windows XP. I currently use it for one single task -- scanning film photos -- because the software that came with the Canon scanner is for Win or Mac only. When I occasionally need something more modern, I use my Linux computer. And even Linux is too complicated to my liking. A couple of months ago I tried to update the Linux system myself. I have been unable to install even Lubuntu, let alone Ubuntu. Apparently the automatic installation goes smoothly only if you have a recent machine and a big memory. The only distribution that installed without hassle, even in a computer about 12 years old, was Fedora. That was really nice. But it is not my favorite distribution, so I asked a computer technician to install Arch Linux for me, and it is working fine. Back to the original question. My only reason to keep Windows files would be in case they are required, under FreeDOS, to access parts of the hardware such as PCMCIA cards or whatever. If that is not the case, then I will happily erase Windows. Summing up, it's either FreeDOS or Linux ... and perhaps Haiku in the future :-) Marcos -- Marcos Fávero Florence de Barros Campinas, Brazil -- AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Any Windows files useful for FreeDOS?
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:03 PM, Rugxulo rugx...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros fav...@mpcnet.com.br wrote: I got an old laptop with Windows 2000 Professional (NT). I will now change the file system to FAT16, and install FreeDOS. Can't you dual boot?? I'm fairly sure you can. (Presumably some local Win2k expert like rr could give some advice, heh.) Search Google for boot.ini or such. I think all you need is a DOS boot sector (maybe sys /bootonly ??). I have an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook p2110, It came with WinXP SP2, I swapped the 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SOs failed laptop, repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, and FreeDOS. Win2K got a 20GB slice, running on NTFS, Ubuntu and Puppy got 8GB slices on ext4, and FreeDOS got a 2GB slice formatted FAT32, with a small raw partition shared between Ubuntu and Puppy as a swap partition. Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's slices and see each other's files. I found an open source driver that lets 2K read/write the ext4 slices the Linux installs live on. 2K and Linux can both see and read/write the FAT32 slice. FreeDOS can't see anything else, but I don't care because it has no need to. I *did* have fun getting FreeDOS to actually boot from Grub2, and had to fiddle for a while before I got it to do so. (Alas, I no longer recall just what fiddle did the trick.) It worked fine till I had to reinstall 2K to fix Windows related issues. That broke booting FreeDOS from Grub. I could still run all of the DOS stuff on the FreeDOS slice in an NTVDM under 2K, so it was an annoyance but not crippling. I went with 2K over XP because 2K is less resource hungry. The Lifebook has a whopping 256MB of RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off the top by the Transmeta CPU for code morphing. On the 2K reinstall, I was able to get what Win2K itself used booted to a desktop to about 85MB, and it actually booted with reasonable speed. (The box as I got it with XP Pro took 8 minutes to boot, and was frozen snail slow once it had.) 2K was actually more or less usable, as were Ubuntu and Puppy. FreeDOS flew. BTW, I don't suppose you have install discs, but if so you could always reinstall it to boot atop FAT32. At least, any Windows before Vista could still do so. Granted, allegedly less security, less file system features supported, etc. But at least then you wouldn't be stuck rely on third-party stuff (TestDisk?) to read NTFS or having to reboot every time you want to copy a file. I installed FreeDOS on FAT32 and had no problems. I don't see a reason to go FAT16. P.S. Actually, some people say that Win2k was pretty similar to XP, and thus it was mostly DOS friendly (NTVDM) re: DJGPP stuff. I know it's old and lots of Windows apps (cruelly) don't support it anymore (including MSVC), but some people (e.g. CWS) swear by it (lower footprint, no need to phone home, etc). Well, whatever, I guess it all depends on what you're trying to do, how much self-sacrifice you're willing to endure, etc. :-)) See above. All the DOS apps I use run in a console window under 2K with NTVDM. I am *not* a gamer, and don't run DOS games that use graphics and write to video memory. All of my stuff is character mode. Most of what I run under XP runs in 2K. The biggest issue is that low RAM and slow (UDMA 4) HD make running large apps problematic. They are slow to load and sluggish once up. I don't even try to run a current browser, but since I seldom try to browse from the box, that;'s not a pressing concern. __ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 -- AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
