Hi Rugxulo, NWeissma, > There may indeed be bugs in GParted, we don't know. > > Long story short: to install DOS, you need to do this: "fdisk, > (reboot), format, sys". Make sure you at least minimally have > KERNEL.SYS (akin to MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS or IBMBIO.COM IBMDOS.COM) > and COMMAND.COM, preferably something more useful too!
Please see below - if you have any Windows data that could get lost, GPARTED is much better than FDISK as FDISK will almost always lose data because you cannot resize with it - you can only delete and create. Note that you can only resize inactive partitions, so your Windows (or Linux, if you have it) must be shut down and not just "sleeping" while you resize it's disks. > However, Vista and Win7 both have an in-built ability > to (mostly) resize your NTFS cleanly, so that is preferred. That is good to know :-) Note that FreeDOS can only boot from a primary partition, not extended / logical, unless you use some advanced tricks. You can have at most four such partitions, or three if you have any extended ones or logical ones, which is often a bottleneck. You could also boot DOS from CD/DVD/BD or USB/SD or similar disks. You can even let DOS share a FAT partition with an older version of Windows, with the right boot loader trick. Be careful to not make your Windows unbootable if you do it wrong, or have a Windows boot disk around to fix it ;-) > For changing the boot sequence on newer Windows (Vista and Win7), your > best bet is probably? something like EasyBCD freeware, as it changed > compared to WinXP and no longer uses the same old BOOT.INI method. > On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 4:43 PM, nweissma wrote: >> https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/freedos/index.php?title=Install >> states: >> >>> If your computer has no partitions with FAT filesystem yet, you will have >>> to create one before you can install DOS. For example GPARTED which is >>> included with many Linux distros and many Linux versions which can be run >>> directly from CD or DVD (no installation of Linux on harddisk needed) can >>> resize your existing NTFS Windows partitions to make space for DOS without >>> having to reinstall Windows. >> >> this may not be correct: http://gparted.org/faq.php#faq-14 and >> http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13777 It is good to know that certain resize operations may fail and it is good to have a Windows boot disk around if a more and/or resize made Windows unbootable. However, it is still exceptional to actually lose data or really break things. In that sense, it is MUCH better to use GPARTED than to use FDISK, because you do always lose all data on affected partitions if you use delete one and create two smaller ones instead of a resize and create. In general, GPARTED is pretty easy to use and pretty reliable. Regards, Eric PS: In a virtual computer, you often reboot by clicking a button on your real desktop to "reset" the virtual computer. And if you only have DOS and no other operating systems in the virtual PC, there is of course no problem with FDISKing and FORMATting that virtual PC, as it contains no virtual data that would be lost... PPS: Note that partition types have size limits. FAT16 should be circa 35 MB to 2 GB, FAT32 should be at least 270 MB. In theory, you could make them as small as circa 2.2 or 35 MB respectively. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
