Thanks to your tip I was able to capture the error message: ------------------------------------------------------ C: HD1, Pri[1],CHS= 0-1-1,start= 0 MB,size= 1027 MB D: HD2, Pri[2],CHS= 0-1-1,start= 0 MB,size= 3380 MB IO error: cylinder > 1023 IO error: cylinder > 1023 Press F8 to trace or F5 to skip CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT ------------------------------------------------------
Pressing any key at this point causes the invalid opcode error to occur, although in a different fashion (it happens only twice, and pressing any key after that does nothing at all). I'm guessing it doesn't like my hard drive, since it's complaining about cylinders. The drive being identified as C: in this case is the drive called D: if I boot from the CD-ROM. It's a Seagate ST51080a with 1 GB capacity. There was some kind of warning about DOS possibly requiring it to be configured as 525 cylinders, 64h, 63 sectors instead of the default 2100 cylinders, resulting in halved disk capacity, but my BIOS will not allow me to change the disk's configuration. It has already decided that it has 2100 cylinders and there is no option to manually configure it.' I should be able to dual boot, since my BIOS has a built-in boot manager that lets me choose either the primary hard drive, the secondary hard drive, the DVD drive, or the network. But since I can't get this hard drive to configure properly, I guess I'm out of luck? James Haley >From: Eric Auer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: freedos installation >Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 19:44:20 +0200 (MEST) > >Hi James, >as far as I understand, your XP is still fine, but the >problem is that dos installed itself into the first DOS >partition, which happens to be your recovery partition? >The strange thing here is that your recovery partition >was supposed to be invisible - neither windows nor dos >should have a drive letter for it. >You can hit the "pause" / break key on the upper right >of your keyboard to read that "io error" message. >How big is your disk and does your bios detect the >disk size correctly? >You cannot boot DOS from what DOS calls D:, but you can >install packages to any drive which is visible for DOS. >From which operating system did you run sys d: ? >About the error messages - it is just a crash, and it >does not make any difference that you get 1000 identical >error messages about it. Windows would just have silently >rebooted or frozen in such a situation. >About installation again: Either hide the recovery partition >(if Windows has no interface for this, use Linux to set the >partition type from fat32lba to hiddenfat32lba). Then DOS >will call your slave drive c:, or install most of the stuff >to d: and leave the actual DOS kernel on your recovery >partition (as well as config sys or fdconfig sys). Everything >else can be on any drive letter... >You will have to use some sort of boot menu in either case, >as I assume that you want to keep both DOS and Windows on >the same computer. Windows includes one, configurable via >boot.ini... Please send your reply to this mail to the >mailing list again. Thanks! > >Eric > >PS: If you used beta9sr2 - that one is far too automatic >and a bit outdated. Sorry about that. > > _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
