Op 17-1-2012 4:31, TJ Edmister schreef: > > Greetings, I wanted to try out FreeDOS on an old laptop where I have > replaced the HDD with a CF card. I am looking to avoid floppies/CDs > however, so I am wondering if anyone has an image that could be written to > the CF card that would then boot into FreeDOS. I`ve found that once I have > a bootable CF card I can dump the whole thing to an image using a sector > editor, and use that image to make another CF card of equal or greater > size bootable as well. Having a bootable image available would be > convenient for some folks, am I right?
The DOSUSB website offers a LiveCD that uses harddisk emulation. You should be able to extract it using 7Zip for example. Afterwards run WinImage on the harddisk image, select partition, and then save the partition and have WinImage add a partition table and MBR again. > I`m also wondering if it is possible to install FreeDOS onto a FAT16/32 > partition alongside Windows NT4/2K/XP and add it to the Windows boot menu > by pointing it to a file containing the FreeDOS boot sector. That is how I > keep a win98 command prompt around as an option on 2K/XP boxes. The tricky > part of course is getting that boot sector, along with the numbers in it > that match the drive geometry. I`m assuming FreeDOS uses its own boot > sector that is different than a DOS or win9x one, is this correct? Does it > use "IO.SYS" and "MSDOS.SYS" as system files or are they called something > else? It's possible, but I'm not 100% sure FreeDOS won't ruin the NT bootloader. Think I disabled all SYS code except for offering the user a choice at end of installation. Getting a bootsector created by SYS is quite simple: SYS C: C: C:\FREEDOS.BIN /BOOTONLY If used as this it won't even write to the real bootsector area, but instead to this file C:\FREEDOS.BIN Bootsector indeed is different, and only kernel file is \KERNEL.SYS (though you can rename it, and specify which name to load in the bootsector, it's the /K option in FreeDOS SYS program). The tricky part is getting to run SYS if you can only operate in Windows. Usually a bootable CD or so is needed first. I don't know if SYSLINUX, GRUB and a recent DOS USB flash installer called RUFUS [ http://pbatard.github.com/rufus/ ] can interact with the drive where Windows is running on, from Windows itself. > The other thing I`m curious about is how speedstep and CPU states are > working under FreeDOS. I have another laptop which had the CPU (a > low-voltage one that is soldered to the board!) replaced with a faster > model. Since the BIOS wasn`t designed to support this, it always boots up > at the default (minimum) speed. There are utilities to manipulate the CPU > speed under Windows but I haven`t found anything that runs under DOS. I > tried FDAPM, and got an error about "unable to parse ..." but > surprisingly, using the "speed" argument I was able to switch it to > something even slower (but not faster). I didn`t know a Pentium M could > run at less than 600MHz, but when I used speed4 it seemed like it was cut > down to half that speed. (I took this opportunity to run the old bytemark > CPU benchmark, which normally would crash on anything 600MHz or faster due > to a bug) FDAPM, PCISLEEP or some ancient DOS slowdown utilities. DOS in general doesn't do much with ACPI. ATX-shutdown-support is present though. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
