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Developers....Microsoft has released Virtual PC
2004 free...If you have a qualifying machine...i.e., must run a legit copy of
Win 2K/XP, you can download and install VPC 2K4, install FreeDOS using the
iso and begin testing and development. If you make copies of your DOS boot disks
(from MS, IBM, or DR/Novell) you can install yet another virtual machine and
develop applications, then save them on 'virtual floppies' and move them over to
the FreeDOS test machine.
Who needs VMWare??? (just kidding)
Well, I downloaded the FD 1.0 ISO and proceeded to
install it. Since I am a hobby developer, I have a copy of VMWare and Microsoft
VPC 2004 both installed on my machine (got to fill up the 250GB disk
somehow)...anyways, in each VM program, I have installed MS-DOS 6.22 and FreeDOS
1.0. The MS-DOS VM is my development environment, and well you can guess what
FreeDOS is. Presently running under FreeDOS 1.0 is Turbo Pascal 4.0, and OpenGEM
5 (Shane). My MS-DOS VM has an assortment of development tools from Microsoft,
Borland, and the freeware/shareware tools DJGPP, NASM, Pacific-C, and A86.
Since my original PC only had a 5.25" floppy drive,
I have put that in my Linux box and I make floppy images there and move them
over via Windows sharing to the XP machine and mount the disk images in the VMs.
So far so good....well, until now.
I installed FreeDOS using the downloaded ISO. I was
shocked to see ISOLINUX, which I have already posted about, not a major problem,
but I will point out that Microsoft doesn't use grub to boot XP, and IBM didn't
use LILO to boot the OS/2 Warp CDs so I think we (the FreeDOS development
community) can find a way to get the FreeDOS boot CD to use FreeDOS to
boot.
I followed the prompts, pretty simple install,
although I wondered why so many of the normally required utilities in DOS could
be deselected in FreeDOS. I would maybe hide that option under an advanced
option along with FAT32 kernel support, but for most newbies, let them ride with
a default installation that includes the common DOS utilities.
The file copy from an ISO on a 7200RPM hard drive
is quick...no glitches....the post setup was interesting, looks like a couple of
batch files. So I'm done, and here it is, my brand spanking new FreeDOS 1.0
machine...oops I forgot to 'eject' the ISO, lemme press 'h'...
Well after the initial install, I was shocked to
find sitting in plain view, the kernel of FreeDOS. MS-DOS and its descendants
use two HIDDEN files, emphasis on hidden...Upon checking the attributes using
attrib, I found that KERNEL.SYS only had its archive bit set. My next step was
to try out some of the commands. I type in EDIT...cool a nice looking somewhat
similar to QBASIC/EDIT editor pops up. FORMAT runs beautifully..defaulting to a
quick format unlike MS-DOS long 80 track format (for my 1.44MB
'floppy').
I 'put in' my OpenGEM CD. ShaneLand OpenGEM
is doubly compressed, so you have to decompress the OPENGEM5 file before
the install. so I tried to do an xcopy OPENGEM5.ZIP c:\tmp /s/e (c:\tmp didn't
exist)...well I guess /s and /e aren't options for the current version of XCOPY.
So I did the two step and copied the file.
After that I decided that I needed to run CHKDSK on
my hard drive. Big mistake. CHKDSK did fine on my floppy, but several files in
the file system on C: were reported as being around 4,294,901,760 bytes (4096K
give or take) some even more. So acting as a typical user, (even though I can
mount the virtual hard drive under MS-DOS) I run CHKDSK with the /F option. Well
the good thing is it 'fixed' the problem (FAT16 HD, 2047MB partition). The bad
news is that COMMAND.COM and KERNEL.SYS were files that should have been 4096K
and guess what, after CHKDSK finished, they were. Now all of a sudden, my
FREEDOS won't boot. So after panicking like a new computer user because I've
just foobar'd my machine and cant boot to DOS,I 'insert' my BOOT disk and boot
the computer. All is well. I copy the offended files back to the computer
(COMMAND.COM and KERNEL.SYS) and proceed immediately to type 'attrib +s +h +r
KERNEL.SYS'.
This concludes my first 24 hours with FreeDOS.
Hopefully this looooooooong e-mail will help someone or someones. I will try to
help with the code as best I can.
-T
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