Re: [Freedos-user] Thousands of Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x... messages, error when formatting
2012/11/9 Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de: Hi Bernd, Andre, I was going to install FreeDOS 1.1 on a USB drive within qemu 1.1.1 on Opensuse 12.2 32 bit. After selecting the language in the FreeDOS installer, my notebook was busy during the next hour with thousands of thousands of messages like Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x The kernel produces that message when getblock fails. Bernd, the message is printed by clusterMessage and getblock is a macro for getblk (x, y, FALSE) which apparently is, more or less, a wrapper for dskxfer to let BUFFERS do their work... Probably something tried to access the drive as if it already was formatted while it was not, maybe failed to set a flag to mark the drive as unformatted in some internal processing... Yesterday I tested a little bit more and I noticed that these messages (Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x...) don't appear if I change only one small step in my way: If I use the partition label c (FAT32) instead of 6 (FAT16), all is fine. Maybe this helps you to further track down the errors? I've seen this as well, usually with a drive C: (primary active FAT32 partition) that didn't have a filesystem on it yet (done by FORMAT) Some installation tools check drive C: to see if it's present. That might fit the above, yes. Is it specific to USB drives? Here is exactly what I did: - plugged in a USB drive - erased all partition data with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=16 - created a new FAT16 partition with fdisk (1 GB, partition label 6), set this to active - created the filesystem with mkfs -t vfat -n FreeDOS /dev/sdb1 You should reboot between the last 2 steps if it were DOS, but apparently you used Linux. When you create DOS drives in Linux, you might accidentally mismatch CHS, LBA, FAT32 and FAT16 at some point, although I am not sure if there is a risk to do so during the steps described above. Also, at least with older mkdosfs (from dosfstools) it happened that the partition offset and/or geometry were not nicely set in the boot sector, causing extra work for my boot sector installing Perl script sys-freedos-linux. I think that using SYS in DOS itself had no problems, though, at least when you booted via any non-virtual way first :-) You could try providing this USB Flash Device to QEMU without first assigning a partition and filesystem. FreeDOS is able to do it by itself using the FDISK program to create a partition, and FORMAT program (after rebooting QEMU once FDISK has finished). FORMAT C: /Q should do the trick. Afterwards run SYS C: Actually you should NOT use FORMAT /Q in this case: That would try to backup some details to support later UNFORMAT which does not make much sense on a freshly partitioned drive. You can use FORMAT /Q /U to avoid the saving of unformat data if speed is an issue, or just use FORMAT without /Q option to get a non-quick format process :-) If you use /U without /Q, the whole drive contents will be wiped which can take a very long time in DOS. After that, I started qemu with qemu-system-i386 -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom fd11src.iso -boot d. The FreeDOS installer started, I begun the installation with 1. It let me choose my language, and after this the enormous amount of error messages. About an hour later, the installer finally asked me where to install - I chose C: (the installer showed me mysteriously only 255 MB). Then it asked me if I want to format the drive with FAT32 - which I accepted. However, now it showed me the following error message: Invalid Drive! Aborting. [Error 61] FORMAT status: 4 Could not format your hard disk The main.c source code of FORMAT suggests that this will happen if your drive is neither remote nor SUBST-ed but still you cannot get a truename of X:\ where X is the drive letter of the drive in question... Truename here is used to check for ASSIGN, JOIN or SUBST, but as it fails to check this at all, the drive is probably not even registered for DOS yet... Maybe rebooting between the FDISK and the FORMAT step would help here - in the QEMU case virtually rebooting is of course enough :-) Is your USB stick more emulator-friendly if performing the partitioning with Gparted or something? I would also suggest that. GPARTED makes it very easy to partition and format a drive with a few mouse clicks and as you have QEMU, you apparently already have Linux. If not, there are also a number of nice ISOs to make a bootable CD or DVD with GPARTED, or make a boot stick. I will try it with gparted. Standard reference procedure should be something like detailed in: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox Good point. We already have that howto for VirtualBox, somebody could make a howto for Qemu based on that :-) Eric Well, all of this problems would be much less annoying if there would be an image on the FreeDOS site which I can simply dd to an USB drive - all of these error prone steps would
Re: [Freedos-user] Thousands of Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x... messages, error when formatting
Op 10-11-2012 12:11, André Bachmann schreef: Well, all of this problems would be much less annoying if there would be an image on the FreeDOS site which I can simply dd to an USB drive - all of these error prone steps would be unnecessary. Which emulation or (para)virtualisation product uses/produces harddisk images that can directly be 'dd'ed to a physical disk? I've experimented a bit with Isohybrid images (CD image with harddisk header) that can be written to USB stick, but afterwards Windows doesn't like the stick anymore as it wants to format it. Also installing FreeDOS on the same stick isn't that much of a success. USB stick partition layout: * MBR (not UEFI/EFI's GPT) * partition 1: active, primary, (unknown / non-DOS) read-only ISO9660 * partition 2: primary, FAT32, writeable. After writing the FreeDOS CD to partition 1, and booting from the stick, the idea is a small bootdisk image is loaded in memory from this CD filesystem (DOS boots only from FAT, not ISO9660) after which the rest of the 1st partition is accessed. Unfortunately no CD driver exists for this kind of scenario. A workaround is loading a secondary ISO file in memory from this 1st partition, allowing FreeDOS to find its files using the ELTORITO.SYS driver. With the files found, creation and installation to partition 2 is possible Windows insisting on removable media not being allowed to have partitions, let alone using unrecognised filesystems on them, isn't helping at all to proceed. [ http://code.google.com/p/nanox-microwindows-nxlib-fltk-for-dos/wiki/XFDOS ] uses a bootable harddisk image but no individual harddisk image file is available, only a CD which uses harddisk-emulation. Bernd -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Thousands of Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x... messages, error when formatting
Hi! (Note to Felix: That yahoo group seems to be not open?) Yesterday I tested a little bit more and I noticed that these messages (Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x...) don't appear if I change only one small step in my way: If I use the partition label c (FAT32) instead of 6 (FAT16), all is fine. Maybe this helps you to further track down the errors? Maybe your drive is too big (more than 8 GB if geometry is perfect) or has confused geometry (USB does not have any real CHS geometry, so mismatches between different components about what CHS should be are frequent) which made FAT16 CHS a problem? Try using type e (FAT16 LBA) and maybe compare if type b (FAT32 CHS) fails as type 6 (FAT16 CHS) if you want to do some more experiments :-) Actually you should NOT use FORMAT /Q in this case: That would try to backup some details to support later UNFORMAT I think FORMAT /Q /U or format without options are nice. Well, all of this problems would be much less annoying if there would be an image on the FreeDOS site which I can simply dd to an USB drive - all of these error prone steps would be unnecessary. That would be relatively easy with a FAT partitioned image but gives you side effects: If the image is for size X and your stick has more space, the rest just stays unused. But then on the other hand, more fancy approaches like Bernd's image with ISO and FAT partitions combined have other side effects, in his case making Windows think that the stick is so weird that Windows wants to format it :-p I think because everybody has sticks around and prices are low, we could try to make people happy with a small image (whatever is appropriate, maybe 1 GB? Then you also have a lot of space to add your own data) with fixed partitioning. Advanced users can use e.g. GPARTED to grow the partition to fill the stick or can add more partitions, while others can just re-format the stick when they are done with using it for DOS. I assume re-formatting is easy in Windows?? Regards, Eric -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Thousands of Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x... messages, error when formatting
Op 9-11-2012 16:47, André Bachmann schreef: Hi there, I was going to install FreeDOS 1.1 on a USB drive within qemu 1.1.1 on Opensuse 12.2 32 bit. After selecting the language in the FreeDOS installer, my notebook was busy during the next hour with thousands of thousands of messages like Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x I've seen this as well, usually with a drive C: (primary active FAT32 partition) that didn't have a filesystem on it yet (done by FORMAT) Some installation tools check drive C: to see if it's present. Here is exactly what I did: - plugged in a USB drive - erased all partition data with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=16 - created a new FAT16 partition with fdisk (1 GB, partition label 6), set this to active - created the filesystem with mkfs -t vfat -n FreeDOS /dev/sdb1 You could try providing this USB Flash Device to QEMU without first assigning a partition and filesystem. FreeDOS is able to do it by itself using the FDISK program to create a partition, and FORMAT program (after rebooting QEMU once FDISK has finished). FORMAT C: /Q should do the trick. Afterwards run SYS C: After that, I started qemu with qemu-system-i386 -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom fd11src.iso -boot d. The FreeDOS installer started, I begun the installation with 1. It let me choose my language, and after this the enormous amount of error messages. About an hour later, the installer finally asked me where to install - I chose C: (the installer showed me mysteriously only 255 MB). Then it asked me if I want to format the drive with FAT32 - which I accepted. However, now it showed me the following error message: Invalid Drive! Aborting. [Error 61] FORMAT status: 4 Could not format your hard disk Not seen this error before, sorry. Is your USB stick more emulator-friendly if performing the partitioning with Gparted or something? Standard reference procedure should be something like detailed in: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox Bernd -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Thousands of Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x... messages, error when formatting
Hi Bernd, Andre, I was going to install FreeDOS 1.1 on a USB drive within qemu 1.1.1 on Opensuse 12.2 32 bit. After selecting the language in the FreeDOS installer, my notebook was busy during the next hour with thousands of thousands of messages like Run chkdsk: Bad FAT I/O: 0x The kernel produces that message when getblock fails. Bernd, the message is printed by clusterMessage and getblock is a macro for getblk (x, y, FALSE) which apparently is, more or less, a wrapper for dskxfer to let BUFFERS do their work... Probably something tried to access the drive as if it already was formatted while it was not, maybe failed to set a flag to mark the drive as unformatted in some internal processing... I've seen this as well, usually with a drive C: (primary active FAT32 partition) that didn't have a filesystem on it yet (done by FORMAT) Some installation tools check drive C: to see if it's present. That might fit the above, yes. Is it specific to USB drives? Here is exactly what I did: - plugged in a USB drive - erased all partition data with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=16 - created a new FAT16 partition with fdisk (1 GB, partition label 6), set this to active - created the filesystem with mkfs -t vfat -n FreeDOS /dev/sdb1 You should reboot between the last 2 steps if it were DOS, but apparently you used Linux. When you create DOS drives in Linux, you might accidentally mismatch CHS, LBA, FAT32 and FAT16 at some point, although I am not sure if there is a risk to do so during the steps described above. Also, at least with older mkdosfs (from dosfstools) it happened that the partition offset and/or geometry were not nicely set in the boot sector, causing extra work for my boot sector installing Perl script sys-freedos-linux. I think that using SYS in DOS itself had no problems, though, at least when you booted via any non-virtual way first :-) You could try providing this USB Flash Device to QEMU without first assigning a partition and filesystem. FreeDOS is able to do it by itself using the FDISK program to create a partition, and FORMAT program (after rebooting QEMU once FDISK has finished). FORMAT C: /Q should do the trick. Afterwards run SYS C: Actually you should NOT use FORMAT /Q in this case: That would try to backup some details to support later UNFORMAT which does not make much sense on a freshly partitioned drive. You can use FORMAT /Q /U to avoid the saving of unformat data if speed is an issue, or just use FORMAT without /Q option to get a non-quick format process :-) If you use /U without /Q, the whole drive contents will be wiped which can take a very long time in DOS. After that, I started qemu with qemu-system-i386 -hda /dev/sdb -cdrom fd11src.iso -boot d. The FreeDOS installer started, I begun the installation with 1. It let me choose my language, and after this the enormous amount of error messages. About an hour later, the installer finally asked me where to install - I chose C: (the installer showed me mysteriously only 255 MB). Then it asked me if I want to format the drive with FAT32 - which I accepted. However, now it showed me the following error message: Invalid Drive! Aborting. [Error 61] FORMAT status: 4 Could not format your hard disk The main.c source code of FORMAT suggests that this will happen if your drive is neither remote nor SUBST-ed but still you cannot get a truename of X:\ where X is the drive letter of the drive in question... Truename here is used to check for ASSIGN, JOIN or SUBST, but as it fails to check this at all, the drive is probably not even registered for DOS yet... Maybe rebooting between the FDISK and the FORMAT step would help here - in the QEMU case virtually rebooting is of course enough :-) Is your USB stick more emulator-friendly if performing the partitioning with Gparted or something? I would also suggest that. GPARTED makes it very easy to partition and format a drive with a few mouse clicks and as you have QEMU, you apparently already have Linux. If not, there are also a number of nice ISOs to make a bootable CD or DVD with GPARTED, or make a boot stick. Standard reference procedure should be something like detailed in: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=VirtualBox Good point. We already have that howto for VirtualBox, somebody could make a howto for Qemu based on that :-) Eric -- Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_nov ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
