Hi!
Thank you for your answer Bret, it came in just as I figured out by what
was the problem.
I installed FreeDOS using the LiveCD, which also partitioned my disk and
formatted the C drive...
I don't know if the warning is normal, but from what I could check, the
FreeDOS LiveCD installer by default doesn't create a single FAT32
partition (10
GB HDD), but instead it creates a single 2048 MB primary partition,
formatted
FAT32, and four 2 GB logical partitions, and it doesn't format them.
Since the partitions aren't formatted, FreeDOS doesn't mount them, but
it still
assigns them a letter, and that explains why I had this problem. I didn't
expect this to be the default behavior, that's why I didn't check the HDD
partition table to see what was going on.
A word to the install wizard app, if it were a person:
That was a great way of shooting yourself in the foot :-D
Running out of drive letters by trying to avoid FAT32. In 2022.
To solve this, after deleting the partition table, I booted the LiveCD and
repartitioned the disk using fdisk. It created a single 10 GB partition
which I
later formatted to FAT32 with the included format.exe.
After that, the installation went flawlessly and the problem was solved.
Cool :-)
It would make more sense if the installer made a single FAT16 2 GB
partition, or
used the whole disk to create a FAT32 partition. The crucial bit is not to
silently create the four logical partitions and also leave them
unformatted.
Even if you DO format them, you eventually run out of drive
letters as soon as more than N * 2 GB of disk space exist.
Even typical USB flash drives already have "dangerously" much
space for the installer as long as it behaves at it does now.
One single partition, preferably FAT32, will be enough for
everybody except those who voluntarily opt to create more.
I suggest that there should be an option to let the user decide what to do
between these two options or something else.
Definitely.
Regards, Eric
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