> On Jul 16, 2023, at 10:21 AM, Jay F. Shachter via Freedos-user > <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > [..] > If the answer to the first question is Yes, then I can continue this > narrative, otherwise the remainder of this posting is moot. I copied > FD13FULL.img to a USB stick, stuck it into the above-described > computer, and instructed it to boot from the USB device. The > installation procedure scares me. I have already partitioned my disk > and designated in my mind the logical slice onto which I want to > install FreeDOS, but the installation procedure on FD13FULL.img > implies that I must repartition my disk, and I am afraid to proceed, > lest I irretrievably trash my entire computer.
First... Never install an OS or update an OS on a machine you are not willing to rebuild from scratch! I doesn’t matter how careful you are. I does not matter how new or great the OS and installer is. Things can go wrong with the best of them and leave your machine broken or not even bootable from the internal drives. Backup! When you boot the from the FreeDOS USB stick, that drive should be seen by the OS as drive C:. The installer then queries FDISK to see if a drive D: is present and readable by FreeDOS. If so, it will use that drive as a target for installation. If not, it will prompt to partition the drive. If the installer is prompting to partition using FDISK, it cannot find a hard drive (other than the USB stick) that is suitable to install FreeDOS. There is an advanced mode for the installer. However, that gets only limited testing. Therefore, I recommend you install FreeDOS in a virtual machine or manually. > [..] > then populating the > newly-created vfat filesystem by means of the cp and unzip commands > (the packages, I noticed -- and there is a huge number of them -- are > zip files, but there are also some files that are fundamental to > system that are already present without having to be unzipped, which I > envision simply copying over). That is not really going to work very well. The zip archives are packages. The contain various directory aliases that get remapped during package installation. While many could just be unzipped and used, others will be in directories different from how they are configured and will not function properly. You have multiple options on how you can proceed. 1) You could run the installer in advanced mode. Based on how your machine is setup, this WILL most likely hose your system anyway. 2) You could install FreeDOS to a virtual machine like VirtualBox or QEMU. 3) You could do a hybrid install into DOSBox. The installer defaults to hybrid on that virtual platform. There are DOCs and Youtube videos on how to do type of install. The benefit is having direct and easy access to the DOS filesystem from the host. There are some drawbacks. It is best suited for developers. 4) Install manually. After setting up a partition and it’s boot sector, I would proceed one of two ways. I would either install FreeDOS into a VM’s hard drive using a flat disk image, then copy the files to the hard disk partition. Or…. copy over the kernel and command. Then unzip the FDNPKG and FDIMPLES packages. If you place their files in the proper directories, adjust the FDNPKG.CFG file and configure a few environment variables, you could then use them to install all the other packages. Jerome _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
