If you read back in this thread, the problem was dealt with at length and solved. Dennis
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone on the Bell network. Original Message From: userbeit...@abwesend.de Sent: Saturday, April 8, 2017 3:38 AM To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS. Reply To: Discussion and general questions about FreeDOS. Subject: Re: [Freedos-user] boot floppy disk image too big for a disk On 2017-03-24 03:46, Dennis Fenton wrote: > Read what I wrote. I burned the iso to a CD. I also downloaded the floppy > img. It doesn't fit! > So my first interaction on this forum is from someone who treats me like a > dummy. Perhaps another reason to say to Hell with FreeDOS. This is not possible. The FLOPPY.img contained in http://www.freedos.org/download/download/FD12FLOPPY.zip is exactly 1474560 bytes big, which is the size of a 1.44 MB floppy disk. If this image doesn't fit, no 1.44 MB image will fit on your floppy. In other words: the image is the right size and something else must be wrong. And there is no need to be rude. "Pilot error" is correct in this case, and is meant to make you think - maybe it is you after all who is wrong. To make it absolutely clear: I can confirm that this image WILL FIT on any 1.44 MB floppy drive. I cannot confirm if it will actually boot (I didn't test this... yet... or not that I recall at the moment) BUT it is the right size. Thus it must be you who is wrong with the "doesn't fit" statement. Even so, I understand very much that installing FreeDOS is not trivial since you need to account for so many different hardware cases. And it is very often just a driver that is missing; the original - long lost - driver from the driver disk supplied with the original hardware (IDE, SCSI, CDROM, ...) for DOS, OS/2 and Windows 3.1/NT 3.x... those were the days... Back then you would get the *then new* hardware with the driver on floppy. Trying to install FreeDOS now, about two decades later, makes it hard to get all the driver stuff (who preserves such things?) and configurations right (jumpers, C/H/S in the BIOS etc. - who preserves manuals and quick installation guides?). Good luck! I hope you will figure it out! (As I hope to find the time to make my 486 run FreeDOS eventually... I didn't find the time since after the New Years holidays...) Userbeitrag. The answer from Dennis is correct: > On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 9:32 PM, Dennis Fenton <dwf...@gmail.com> wrote: >> After some research I decided FreeDOS would be a good replacement for >> MS-DOS 6.22 on an old 486 I'm playing with. >> I downloaded and burned to CD the iso. I also downloaded the boot >> floppy disk image because the old 486 will not boot from the external >> SCSI CD drive. >> To my dismay I found that the boot disk image is too big to fit on a >> 1.44 floppy. > The ISO image isn't *intended* to fit on a floppy. It expects to be > installed on a CDROM. > > If you have a machine that *can't* boot form CD and must boot from > floppy, there's a boot floppy zip file you can extract to floppy to > boot from. That assumes the rest of the distribution will be on a CD > you can access from FreeDOS once you've booted from the floppy. See > the Boot Floppy option under "How to install FreeDOS 1.2 »" > > See http://www.freedos.org/download/ > >> This makes me question the decision to switch. How in the world can an >> organization dedicated to promoting this better version of DOS get it >> wrong when it comes to the size of a disk image? >> Do you have a fix for this? > The problem is pilot error. Please read the applicable instructions > on the download page. > ______ > Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
