Hi Eric,
thank you very much for your help, really appreciated!
First of all, my drive letter issue has been solved... more or less.
In my first attempt, I picked the "Install to HD" menu item to see the
available options, then chose to "Return to DOS". This way, I got A: as
the main/current drive letter, which refers to the "FD13-CDBI" volume.
This was the reason for my original post, since I believed this was the
"standard" behavior.
Then, I rebooted the LiveCD and out of curiosity I picked the last menu
item "FreeDOS is a trademark...": to my surprise, the system did boot,
asking me if I wanted to install to HD. Upon my "no", FreeDOS came up
with C: as the main/current drive letter (volume "FD13-HDX86"),
assigning A: to the physical floppy drive!
Then I booted once again, this time picking the first menu item "Use
FreeDOS 1.3 in live Environment mode", and the system loaded a LOT of
packages it didn't bother to earlier, ending with R: as the main/current
drive letter (volume "FD13-RAMDRV"), and with A: assigned to a new
volume "FD13-HYDRA".
So, it seems that FreeDOS has (at least) three different behaviors about
how to assign drive letters, one of which is fortunately suiting my
needs. Albeit a bit confusing for my newbie skills, at least I can work
from there now :)
Answering your questions.
My BIOS does support a single floppy drive, so I detached the original
3.5/1.44M drive and replaced it with the 5.25/360K. So there is just one
floppy drive in the system. Supported drives are 5.25/1.2M, 3.5/720K,
3.5/1.44M, 3.5/2.88M.
The tool I've been suggested to use is Dave Dunfield’s ImageDisk
(http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/img/), since it does not relies on BIOS
settings; so, assuming the issue comes from the BIOS, it could allow me
to read those disks.
Of course, it is at all possible that all those disks are gone for good,
since they are 25 years old or so; indeed, I did manage to access the
floppy drive from both Linux and FreeDOS (after my second boot, as
above) and I always get "Can't read superblock" (Linux) or "Seek error"
(FreeDOS) on the 5-6 disks I tried to read. BTW, it seems widely known
that WinXP does not support 5.25/360K drives at all.
Now, I just have to find a way to bring the ImageDisk tool into
FreeDOS... not so trivial when working from a CD with no access to
floppy disks, USB drives, network and hard disks.
Oh well, I'll come up with something! :)
Thanks again!
Marco
Il 20/08/2021 13:29, Eric Auer ha scritto:
PS: I suspect that your computer with 5.25 drive also has
a 3.5 drive, so the 5.25 may be B: and gets moved to "C:"
while C: cannot be a floppy in FreeDOS? In that case, you
could try to change jumpers, wiring and BIOS settings to
make the 5.25 drive A: so it gets moved to B: when you
boot from FreeDOS CD?
However, as you say your BIOS does not support the drive
at all, you can expect some problems anyway. Which tools
do you plan to use to access 5.25 disks and which types
of drives and disks does the BIOS support well? Does it
support having 2 floppy drives or only one? I remember a
case where only the BIOS failed to support two, while the
hardware did support two, but it could also happen that
the controller only supports one.
Can you access the 5.25 with Linux or XP, by the way?
Feel free to reply on the list in the original thread.
Regards, Eric
Il 20/08/2021 13:24, Eric Auer ha scritto:
Hi!
In theory, when you boot from a CD containing a virtual boot
floppy image, the BIOS is supposed to move your real floppy
drive to the next drive letter, so it should be B: When you
use a MEMDISK bootable ramdisk, I expect similar effects.
In case of the BIOS method, we could add a tool which leaves
boot image mode and returns drive letters to normal, but of
course this will have side effects by "taking out" the boot
floppy (image) while you might still need files from it.
If it is a problem for you that the real floppy moves to B:,
you could also work with DOS commands to reassign letters,
but I suspect similar problems as with leaving boot image
mode, so I would recommend to stick to B: for real floppy
until you can boot FreeDOS from an actual fixed drive or
from an actual floppy.
Another method would be to use a bootable harddisk image on
the boot CD, so the real fixed disk gets moved to D: etc. and
the real floppy stays at A: all the time. Which boot images
use which style of boot image depends on which of our images
you use (we also have USB thumb drive boot images) and which
boot menu option you select :-)
Regards, Eric
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