Hi, On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 9:54 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 8:03 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:48 PM, Marcos Favero Florence de Barros >> <fav...@mpcnet.com.br> wrote: >>> >>> I got an old laptop with Windows 2000 Professional (NT). I will >>> now change the file system to FAT16, and install FreeDOS. >> >> Can't you dual boot?? I'm fairly sure you can. > > I have an ancient Fujitsu Lifebook p2110, It came with WinXP SP2, I > swapped the 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SOs failed laptop, > repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, and > FreeDOS. Win2K got a 20GB slice, running on NTFS,
<off-topic> BTW, I never did understand why Vista on up required so much more than 2K or XP. I mean, I know XP SP3 added a lot (1 GB? so total is around 2.5??), but it's still vastly smaller than typical 12-16 GB install of Vista or 7. I've heard some say, "You can slim it down to 7 GB", but I still wonder what is wasting all that space. A GB is a lot of room. (Maybe it's all printer drivers? Language files? Didn't Snow Leopard or whatever remove a lot of those in lieu of grabbing from network if needed?) Actually, a quick check of c:\windows\fonts shows that even that takes 300+ MB these days! Though I shouldn't be too surprised, even Win95 was like 18 overformatted floppies. Arguably, you don't need most of those at all. <off-topic> > Ubuntu and Puppy got > 8GB slices on ext4, and FreeDOS got a 2GB slice formatted FAT32, Good, because FAT16 is horrible on anything over 512 MB. Not slow, just wasteful. > with a small "raw" partition shared between Ubuntu and Puppy as a swap > partition. Ubuntu and Puppy mount each other's slices and see each > other's files. I found an open source driver that lets 2K read/write > the ext4 slices the Linux installs live on. 2K and Linux can both see > and read/write the FAT32 slice. FreeDOS can't see anything else, but > I don't care because it has no need to. I consider this a minor flaw in DOS, but I guess most people (including me!) don't have the time or energy or skills to write a network redirector driver for another file system. (Paragon had a shareware one, IIRC.) Even LTOOLS and Odi's LFN Tools don't work for me on my system (gotta love bugs ... NOT!). TestDisk isn't really the same thing, but it seems to more or less work. I used that a tiny bit fairly recently. > I *did* have fun getting FreeDOS to actually boot from Grub2, and had > to fiddle for a while before I got it to do so. (Alas, I no longer > recall just what fiddle did the trick.) It worked fine till I had to > reinstall 2K to fix Windows related issues. That broke booting > FreeDOS from Grub. I could still run all of the DOS stuff on the > FreeDOS slice in an NTVDM under 2K, so it was an annoyance but not > crippling. GRUB 2? The new version? Ugh. IIRC, it's much more complicated, but I guess that's debatable. I guess it's unavoidable with UEFI and tons of quirky OSes that require handholding. Part of the problem is having to use the MBR to boot a separate program (on its own partition?) just to boot the real OS! As for Windows hosing other OSes, it's probably less inept and sinister than it sounds. Probably they just don't want to deal with tons of tech support calls about their OS not booting. (It's implied here that most people only care about Windows, which is probably mostly true.) It really shouldn't be hard for someone somewhere to repair this for you, Dennis. As long as the FreeDOS partition is active, primary FAT with a working boot sector, it should be possible (and "easy", famous last words) to chainload something to it. I don't know. Quite honestly, multi-booting (or just booting in general) is an arcane, very very difficult black box. There are too many competing OSes, so they just can't (or won't) get along very easily. > I went with 2K over XP because 2K is less resource hungry. The > Lifebook has a whopping 256MB of RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off > the top by the Transmeta CPU for code morphing. On the 2K reinstall, > I was able to get what Win2K itself used booted to a desktop to about > 85MB, and it actually booted with reasonable speed. (The box as I got > it with XP Pro took 8 minutes to boot, and was frozen snail slow once > it had.) Yuck. Anyways, as mentioned before, XP is still "mostly" lean. I think you'd have to disable some stuff via "msconfig". Though obviously you can't run behemoths like Firefox (comfortably) on such "small" RAM machines. > 2K was actually more or less usable, as were Ubuntu and > Puppy. FreeDOS flew. I should hope so! ;-) > I installed FreeDOS on FAT32 and had no problems. I don't see a > reason to go FAT16. No, me either, esp. not for 2 GB. Maybe for 512 or less (to avoid tons of slack waste). There are some rare, low-level, third-party DOS tools that won't work on FAT32, but for the most part, you shouldn't have to worry about that. >> P.S. Actually, some people say that Win2k was pretty similar to XP, >> and thus it was "mostly" DOS friendly (NTVDM) re: DJGPP stuff. I know >> it's old and lots of Windows apps (cruelly) don't support it anymore >> (including MSVC), but some people (e.g. CWS) swear by it (lower >> footprint, no need to phone home, etc). > > See above. All the DOS apps I use run in a console window under 2K > with NTVDM. I am *not* a gamer, and don't run DOS games that use > graphics and write to video memory. All of my stuff is character > mode. It's not true that NTVDM is perfect. There were many bugs, they just never fixed them. DJGPP had to use some workarounds. So DJGPP stuff works fairly well by design, but others (e.g. OpenWatcom-based pmode stuff) not as much. As for gaming, they never intended NT to be a gaming OS. > Most of what I run under XP runs in 2K. The biggest issue is that low > RAM and slow (UDMA 4) HD make running large apps problematic. They > are slow to load and sluggish once up. I don't even try to run a > current browser, but since I seldom try to browse from the box, > that;'s not a pressing concern. Like I said before, I used Opera much more comfortably on my low RAM XP machine than otherwise. But I'm not sure if latest versions are still as lean or compatible or whatnot. In fact, I hear that Opera is switching their backend (Presto??) to Webkit (or Blink or whatever). So who knows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) platform delivers complete security visibility with the essential security capabilities. Easily and efficiently configure, manage, and operate all of your security controls from a single console and one unified framework. Download a free trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/alienvault_d2d _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
