Hello, FreeDOS wizards. I seek your help. I would like to use FreeDOS for my project's boot disk:
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ But every time I try, I hit a snag. I am having trouble running winnt.exe (the Windows 2000/XP DOS-mode installer) under FreeDOS. Here is a simplified approach to reproduce the problem. First, create two 2 gig FAT partitions (C: and D:), and format them. Copy a Windows 2000 installation CD to D:\win2k (i.e., so that the bulk of the files land in D:\win2k\i386). Download the following unattend.txt and copy it to C:\unattend.txt. (Note that the contents are not terribly important; this particular copy contains just enough boilerplate to convince winnt.exe to run to completion.) http://unattended.sourceforge.net/freedos/unattend.txt Now, boot to FreeDOS and run this command: d:\win2k\i386\winnt /s:d:\win2k\i386 /u:c:\unattend.txt This invokes the winnt.exe installer, telling it to use the c:\unattend.txt answer file to perform an unattended installation of Windows. You should find that winnt.exe bombs out very quickly with this error message: Setup was unable to install Windows Boot Loader Ensure that your C: drive is formatted and that the drive is not damaged. Setup cannot continue. Press ENTER to exit. A quick Google search suggests that this message normally indicates a corrupt or unformatted C: drive. But if I boot from a vanilla MS-DOS 6.22 floppy instead, winnt.exe runs to completion without any errors. So I believe this is some incompatibility between winnt.exe and FreeDOS. The FreeDOS boot disk I am using is very vanilla. It has kernel.sys version 2.0.28, command.com version 083Beta54, and nothing else; no config.sys, no autoexec.bat, nothing. And still winnt.exe bombs out as shown above. I am willing to help debug this problem any way I can, but I need someone with deeper knowledge of DOS than mine to tell me what to try next. Thanks! - Pat ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?b1ddyi.b3hwCs.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html ==^================================================================
