A quick additional note: Out of pure curiosity, I configured the CD drive in my VirtualBox FreeDOS machine as being a SATA one (that is, attached to a SATA / AHCI controller). Unfortunately, both XCDROM.SYS and UDVD2.SYS failed to recognize it.
So for the time being I will put back XCDROM in the FDNPKG bootable CD, which has the advantage to not freeze under VirtualBox... cheers, Mateusz On 07/21/2013 06:45 PM, Mateusz Viste wrote: > Hi there, > > Just like Rugxulo, I'm a bit lost about all these IDE/SATA/PATA stuff, > until now I was naively assuming that a SATA CD drive is behaving like a > PATA one, and same drivers will work, and the only difference is at the > physical level... > By the way, how come that SATA HDD drives works fine without requiring > any additional drivers then? > > Anyway, I tried to replace the xcdrom.sys with udvd2.sys, as I > understand that the latter have some special magic for supporting SATA > CD drives, but unfortunately I got some troubles - when UDVD2 loads, it > freezes the boot for ~1 minute, which is really a pain. > > I am testing this inside a VirtualBox machine. I recall some months ago > (or was it years maybe?) some flames on the list about this problem, but > don't remember much constructive ideas, other than saying 'virtualbox is > buggy'. > > Is the situation still the same, ie. is there no way to make UDVD start > faster under VirtualBox? Is there any other driver nowaday that could > handle IDE/SATA drives and not freeze VBox for a minute? > > Of course I don't say UDVD2 is bad (and I certainly don't want to start > any nuclear war about this), but the fact is that many people test stuff > under VBox these days, and if a bootable CD freezes 2s after starting > booting, they won't get any further. > > cheers, > Mateusz > > > > > > On 07/21/2013 02:27 AM, Rugxulo wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On Sat, Jul 20, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Bernd Blaauw <bbla...@home.nl> wrote: >>> Mateusz Viste schreef op 20-7-2013 23:08: >>> >>>> Could you tell me please which software you see old? >>> >>> Mainly the bootdisk programs: >>> * kernel: 2036 instead of 2041 >> >> Well, 2036 wasn't exactly horribly buggy nor super old (FD 1.0 in >> 2006), but anyways .... >> >>> * xcdrom instead of udvd2 >> >> I profess complete ignorance of all the IDE / SATA / PATA confusion. I >> never understood it, but I'm no engineer. Can someone please explain >> which driver is best in which circumstance? By default, I assumed that >> UIDE doesn't support SATA or PATA, only IDE (maybe only via legacy >> mode). >> >> In particular, GCDROM and XGCDROM are forks of XCDROM (predecessor of UIDE): >> >> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dos/cdrom/gcdrom/ >> http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/system/xcdrom/ >> >> I'm 99% sure that Jack Ellis would strongly recommend against those >> forks since they are based upon older, buggy code. But I'm not sure if >> they somehow work better in non-IDE instances. >> >>>>> * missing CWSDPMI.EXE apparently >>>> >>>> Yes, cwsdpmi is not on the boot floppy. Mostly because it's not needed - >>>> have you run into any kind of troubles because of the lack of cwsdpmi? >>> >>> Yes: "load error: no DPMI - Get csdpmi*b.zip" upon invoking FDNPKG.EXE >> >> Was this intentional or just to avoid swapping to floppy or ... ? Of >> course, you can bind CWSDSTUB.EXE to the .EXE (and/or use CWSPARAM to >> disable swapping entirely). It's still fairly small. >> >>>> What's happening exactly? I'm not really a VMware aficionado, never >>>> tested FreeDOS with this. Is it some kind of a 'known bug' specific to >>>> FDISK and VMware? What solution would you suggest? >>> >>> I get errorlevel 64: "Error Reading Hard Disk: Search operation failed. >>> Program terminated." >>> >>> fdisk 1.2.1 works. >> >> Meh. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Perhaps one of us needs to ping >> Brian R. again? >> >> Or you could (should?) also include / try XFDISK and/or SPFdisk ?? >> >>> Emulators make things difficult. Dosbox and Rpix86 have very strange >>> behaviour for driveletters, filesystems and memory behaviour. >> >> DOSBox has its own DOS and doesn't use FreeDOS. Unless you're thinking >> of "BOOT"? >> >> Rpix86 presumably means something like QEMU on Raspberry PI. (QEMU >> still has various bugs regarding segmentation, probably since it's not >> needed for Linux emulation.) >> >>>> Is it because of the XCDROM.SYS ? I'm no expert here, but aren't SATA CD >>>> drives acting as some kind of 'emulated IDE' ? Or does it mean that the >>>> boot image would need a special SATA driver, and some detection logic to >>>> load the right driver? This starts to sound complicated :P >>> >>> Yes, and a lack of DOS drivers for various controllers/interfaces is the >>> main culprit. The CD driver works for IDE and for SATA in legacy mode. >>> Now imagine having only an USB CD drive on a system. >>> (or something emulating it, like a Zalman hdd-caddy, or ISOSTICK) >> >> Didn't someone integrate eltorito.sys into isolinux a few years ago? >> Doesn't that help somewhat? >> >> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/boot/syslinux/ >> >>> I'm not sure anymore nowadays the goal is installing FreeDOS on a >>> dedicated system, but rather to have it available and to use it, when >>> necessary. What I mean to say is, people will boot from your CD, then >>> find out their harddisk is partitioned 100% already for Windows. Thus, >>> no easy way to get a drive C: available. >> >> Unavoidable without some (limited) NTFS driver. Maybe GRUB4DOS can >> boot a DOS image file created as one contiguous block file? But how to >> create that ... dunno, someone may have to write it (not me!). >> >> But anyways, Windows since Vista lets you optionally resize the NTFS >> partition, so it's no big deal. (Also RUFUS can install FreeDOS to >> bootable USB stick.) > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics > Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics > Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. > Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. 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