I’m trying to install FreeDOS onto the SSD hard drive of my ThinkPad W520
4284‑WZN copied to RAM from a DVD I have, using its internal DVD‑RW drive.
· In the UEFI BIOS [version 8BET62WW (1.42)], I set the boot to “Legacy Only” &
the ‘SATA Controller Mode Option’ to “Compatibility” mode (IDE mode). Reserved
memory for UEFI Boot Manager has been disabled.
· Using GParted on the latest 64‑bit version of SystemRescueCD (6.1.0), I then
made a FAT32 partition as the very first partition (C:\) with 1 MiB free space
preceding it, aligned to ‘Cylinder’, and made it 7.8 GB (7,439 MiB / 7.26 GiB),
and labeled it as “DOS”. · After that, I inserted the FreeDOS DVD and selected
the options to install everything to the C:\ drive, which all seemed to go
well.
· Upon rebooting however (or from cold boot), all I get is an empty black
screen with a flashing underscore cursor. I’ve hit F12 on startup to bring up
the Boot device List to ensure the hard drive is selected, and have tried
restarting a number of times but never get anything other than the empty black
screen with the blinking cursor of death. I’ve walked away for a long time and
come back, but nothing ever winds‑up loading – cursor continues to blink. I’ve
gone back into BIOS to ensure that all the options I changed saved properly and
have not reset themselves to defaults; everything appears as I configured it.
· I reinserted the live CD and from the FreeDOS prompt, ran the command
“bootfix c:”. It did not fix the problem.
I haven’t tried reformatting the partition and running the installation again
yet; I suspect it will still do the same thing. Should I try that?
Any ideas what I’ve done wrong or why it might not be working?
Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer,
--- Jen
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