Hi Bonnie, I recommend to use a normal file, not /dev/fd0, to save the mbr. Of course you should put a copy of the file in a place where you can reach it if your Linux cannot boot from harddisk. To backup the mbr of the second harddisk, use /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hda, and so on. a / b are primary ide master / slave, and c / d are secondary ide master / slave. However, dd is a dangerous command to use, so you should read the docs and double-check for typos.
> > the freedos installation from the cd says soemthing about the > > installation on a harddrive overwriting the os so i was very nervous What exactly does it say? FreeDOS can only install to FAT partitions, so all Linux and Windows-NTFS partitions are ignored anyway. You should not use FDISK or similar tools during install, unless you know very well what you are doing. It is much better to use Linux or Windows tools for that, as they are powerful and easy to use. If you already have a (preferrably primary, otherwise the boot loader config will be tricky) FAT partition, then there is no need to change the partitioning at all. So... if you have a FAT partition, and it should be a FAT16 one (FAT12 are too small and FAT32 are sometimes hard to make bootable, but you CAN use FAT32), a LBA one if it is not entirely in the first 8 GB of the disk, then the FreeDOS installer should automatically do the rest. It will create a directory for FreeDOS, try to find out if another DOS or Windows is already on the partition, and try to set up a boot menu. If the boot menu setup fails, it might happen that you can only boot FreeDOS but not the other system afterwards. You can usually fix this by using a boot disk of the other system to make the other system bootable again, but then FreeDOS will not be bootable any more... ;-). > > i can just copy freedos from the standalone harddrive to the dos > > partition. will that work if i can figure out how then to use > > chain load to have GRUB present the dos partition as a boot choice. It is easier to use LILO instead of GRUB for that... A sample GRUB config snippet from this list, plus comments: title FreeDOS # hd0,0 would be what Linux calls hda1, read the docs: root (hd0,0) # not needed: # makeactive # to use a file: chainloader /somedir/freedos.bss # to just boot the main OS of that partition: # chainloader +1 boot Normally you can use whatever your Linux config center creates when you select something like "add 'Windows'". To make a partition boot FreeDOS INSTEAD of what it booted before, just run FreeDOS SYS X: (to do that with the X: partition). Check which partitions are which drive letter for DOS first. To only ADD FreeDOS to a boot menu instead, leaving the old operating system unchanged, use something like "SYS X: freedos.bss bootonly". Read the SYS /? output for the exact syntax. This will only save a boot sector to file freedos.bss, and you can tell LiLo, Grub or the Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 boot menu to use that file as chainloader. Note that bootonly means that kernel,sys and command.com will NOT be copied. Copy the kernel manually (with COPY) and put command.com in the FreeDOS directory, so it will not overwrite the command.com of your Windows. If your other operating system also uses config and autoexec, and you want a different configuration for FreeDOS, create a fdconfig,sys file for FreeDOS and fill it with whatever FreeDOS should use instead of the config,sys contents. You can combine that with a shell command like SHELL=c:\fdos\bin\command.com c:\fdos\bin /e:512 /p=fdauto. bat to also make FreeDOS use another file instead of the normal autoexec. So you can keep all config separate from your other DOS or Windows operating system. Note that you will not normally have to do anything of this manually, as the installer should do it for you automatically. IF that fails, make sure to have a boot disk of your other DOS / Windows operating system around, for the repair described above. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
