Hi Eric,
you should try ODIN or the bootdisks on fdos.org (fdos.org/kernel/ also
has the newest kernel and shell versions,
More zip files, more URLs!
http://fd-odin.dosius.com/ (says it's the "primary" but I get DNS lookup
failure)
http://odin.fdos.org/ (this one seems to work)
http://www.ibiblio.org/ (who knows?)
http://sourceforce.net/ (various)
http://www.fdos.org/ (says it's a mirror but looks different)
http://www.freedos.org/ (seems to be down right now)
Then they all have links to even more links, and some go round in
circles, way too much information for my type of brain.
In short, ODIN has the very strange property of "defaulting to F5 style
boot". But it has lots of software included, while the fdos.org boot-
disks are very "bare" :-).
I think that's what I need, the "bare boot disks". I didn't find them
while browsing www.freedos.org, but I'll check the other sites. I found
the official CD-ROM image and FDos1440.img files were too complicated,
but I understand some people want installable versions that
automatically detect hardware.
PS: You should try emm386 instead of umbpci - both can have DMA issues
with UMBs, but emm386 works on all 386+ systems while umbpci does not
support all hardware and can sometimes create slow (uncached) UMBs.
Get it at ftp://ftp.devoresoftware.com/ (newest is emmx204, contains
EMM386 2.04 and HIMEM 3.11).
I have tried both, but PQMagic.exe gets in a strop if EMM386 is running
and some Dell firmware updates don't like EMM386. Some Dell hardware
also does not seem happy with it in the context of USB. To be honest, I
thought UMBPCI was a crazy idea, especially as it's locked to certain
chipsets. I'm just amazed how it can work so well on every type of
expensive hardware I can find. I'm expecting all the RAM to be
over-written or conflict with EEPROMS, but so far it hasn't happened.
PPS: DOS will just ignore RAM above 4 GB and 2nd CPUs and hyperthreading.
And the partitioning scheme is limited to 2 TeraBytes. Try UDMA2 sys :-).
Yes, but the wonderful thing, is the FreeDOS will still WORK with >4Gb
RAM whereas Microsoft's DOS >v6 seems to fall apart, and especially
anything to do with high and extended memory.
Regarding UDMA2.SYS, I'd like to try it out, but does it work with SCSI?
Nearly all my stuff uses SCSI drives.
(of course you can also work without any UMBPCI/EMM386... I prefer the
usbaspi4 and aspidisk drivers for USB, by the way, even DEVLOADable well)
These are news to me! Do you ahve URLs? I'm having problems with USB on
machines that don't support it in BIOS properly such as ASUS A7V333.
--
Gerry Hickman (London UK)
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