Hi, On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 5:45 PM, kurt godel <wb2...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have a machine from '04, and to my dismay, the boot order is greyed out > and cannot be altered. This means I cannot boot from my external dvd drive > or flash drive. Neither can I swap the external drive(sata) for the cd > only(pata) > in the machine; don't have the bucks right now for a drive. I have gotten > around > this in windowsland by copying the contents of the install dvd into a folder, > and > in the folder, simply executing the setup.exe which is invariably present. A > linux > type installer has isolinux, and I can't see how to start the install from > inside the > filesystem as is possible with windows/dos. I don't even know if this is > possible. > Any ideas on that? > -Rich.
You'll have to be more specific. I assume you're trying to install FreeDOS in order to dual boot with Windows XP. If this isn't so, please tell us exact details of what you want. As for booting and installing, it sounds like you're basically saying your BIOS isn't recognizing your drives. (Double check your BIOS boot order.) You could try installing PLoP Boot Manager (http://www.plop.at/) "somewhere" (HD, CD, or floppy) and using that to boot USB. Presumably there are also other tools that would help boot even from weird hardware (GRUB 2? GRUB4DOS? Gujin? SBM?), but I don't know the details. I'm not totally familiar with most automatic installations, not for FreeDOS, Windows, etc. A quick check with 7-Zip FM (no find option available? meh) didn't show any "setup.exe" program. Also, FD11SRC.ISO isn't really a DVD, but anyways .... (Are you sure you burned it verbatim and not as data?) Really all you need is some way to boot DOS, then run "fdisk" (if no FAT drive already exists), reboot, and "sys a: c:" (needs "kernel.sys" and "command.com") to write the boot sector, as a bare minimum (and make sure your MBR or boot manager points to it as active, bootable). If you don't have a working floppy drive and image, you'd have to convert such image to .ISO for CD and boot that (or similar, e.g. use MemDisk or other emulation, esp. if PATA won't boot for you). You say USB doesn't boot, but if it did (e.g. PLoP), you could use RUFUS for a liveUSB FreeDOS. AFAIK, no, you can't install DOS from within Windows. It's probably technically possible but not supported here. (You can mount the .ISO in pre-existing DOS and manually copy files from there, I think SHCDHD or such, but I've not tried. Though that's probably not an option for you here.) I don't know, this is way complicated on modern machines, esp. for a noob like me. Perhaps someone else can give more advice if you can be more specific about what kind of hardware you run. (And presumably various Linux distros can boot on anything, so surely something there would work for you, if only to just diagnose your hardware, e.g. specific CD drive brand and model number.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
