Thanks to your tip I was able to capture the error message:
--
C: HD1, Pri[1],CHS= 0-1-1,start= 0 MB,size= 1027 MB
D: HD2, Pri[2],CHS= 0-1-1,start= 0 MB,size= 3380 MB
IO error: cylinder 1023
IO error: cylinder 1023
Press F8 to trace or F5 to skip CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT
--
Pressing any key at this point causes the invalid opcode error to occur,
although in a different fashion (it happens only twice, and pressing any
key after that does nothing at all).
I'm guessing it doesn't like my hard drive, since it's complaining about
cylinders. The drive being identified as C: in this case is the drive
called D: if I boot from the CD-ROM. It's a Seagate ST51080a with
1 GB capacity. There was some kind of warning about DOS possibly
requiring it to be configured as 525 cylinders, 64h, 63 sectors instead
of the default 2100 cylinders, resulting in halved disk capacity, but my
BIOS will not allow me to change the disk's configuration. It has
already decided that it has 2100 cylinders and there is no option to
manually configure it.'
I should be able to dual boot, since my BIOS has a built-in boot
manager that lets me choose either the primary hard drive, the
secondary hard drive, the DVD drive, or the network. But since I can't
get this hard drive to configure properly, I guess I'm out of luck?
James Haley
From: Eric Auer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: freedos installation
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 19:44:20 +0200 (MEST)
Hi James,
as far as I understand, your XP is still fine, but the
problem is that dos installed itself into the first DOS
partition, which happens to be your recovery partition?
The strange thing here is that your recovery partition
was supposed to be invisible - neither windows nor dos
should have a drive letter for it.
You can hit the pause / break key on the upper right
of your keyboard to read that io error message.
How big is your disk and does your bios detect the
disk size correctly?
You cannot boot DOS from what DOS calls D:, but you can
install packages to any drive which is visible for DOS.
From which operating system did you run sys d: ?
About the error messages - it is just a crash, and it
does not make any difference that you get 1000 identical
error messages about it. Windows would just have silently
rebooted or frozen in such a situation.
About installation again: Either hide the recovery partition
(if Windows has no interface for this, use Linux to set the
partition type from fat32lba to hiddenfat32lba). Then DOS
will call your slave drive c:, or install most of the stuff
to d: and leave the actual DOS kernel on your recovery
partition (as well as config sys or fdconfig sys). Everything
else can be on any drive letter...
You will have to use some sort of boot menu in either case,
as I assume that you want to keep both DOS and Windows on
the same computer. Windows includes one, configurable via
boot.ini... Please send your reply to this mail to the
mailing list again. Thanks!
Eric
PS: If you used beta9sr2 - that one is far too automatic
and a bit outdated. Sorry about that.
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