Hi! > Disc boots: > > Offers to install or quit.
What happens if you select "install"? > (note: if DOS is already installed, setup does no “launch”. > The installer does this specifically for the disc to be used for recovery and > whatnot. > What makes a better recovery disc than a live OS?) > > if quit it sets up a live environment, should only take a couple of seconds. You can make "quit" and "start live CD mode" separate items. If the user just wants a minimal DOS, actually quitting the boot process might be sufficient even without live setup... > Then, if they wanted advanced mode. They can just relaunch the setup.bat /a. > > The live environment should not interfere with the installer. IMHO the live environment can be a target for the installer, to simplify things - same install process, but to RAMDISK. It would of course skip the "SYS target" and "reboot" steps ;-) To reply to a second mail: > Also, what if the user has a partition which is utilized by another OS > but isn't crucial? (Linux swap comes to mind.) Yes, they can easily set > it back up again if they trash it with their FreeDOS installing, but in > a perfect world the installer would check the partition signatures to > see if they match up to anything important, even if there's no actual > files or filesystem. Even if you only kill swap partitions, you break stuff. In the best case, DOS gets deleted the next time that you use Linux. In the worst case, Linux was hibernating on swap and you crash the hibernated session. Plus on the next Linux boot, swap can not be activated (assuming Linux does not automatically format the swap area when it detects it being broken) and Linux could run out of memory during the next boot... In short, other partitions are never not crucial! Either there is free space (unpartitioned space) or there is a FAT partition or it has to be considered valuable. So in case 1, you may make a FAT partition there. In case 2, you can ask the user if it is okay to install DOS to that drive - probably showing the user a directory listing to help them to decide. In case 3, you have to abort the install process and let the user proceed only by hand. Sub-cases: 1a there are no partitions at all - this is so simple that automated partition creation is rather safe. 1b If there are a few partitions already and some free space between them, it MAY happen that operating systems get confused by adding a partition as that could influence their drive letter numbering - thus WARN the user or suggest to proceed by hand. 2a if there are no files on the found partition yet, assume that the user made it for DOS and be happy. 2b if there already are some files, warn user first. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
