Re: [Freedos-user] Dual Boot winth Windows 98

[Björn Morell]

Yes, when booting to Freedos (or DrDos) it wll be C: and my W95 will be 
D: and a logical partiton E:


booting to W95 it will be C: and freedos/drdos will be D: and te logical E:

booting to linux it will be on hd1 (swap on hda2 and backup on hda3) and 
freedos on hb1 and drdos on hb2 and w95 on hdc1


Den 2022-02-12 kl. 13:02, skrev Liam Proven:

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 at 01:52, Travis Siegel  wrote:

Not true.

Sometimes true.


If both of the partitions are primary partitions, and the bootable flag is 
swapped from one to the other, then when one boots, the second will be drive 
d:, and vice versa.

It depends on the OSes in use.

The formal DOS schema is:

[1 primary and then one extended containing multiple logical drives] x per drive

Letter allocation is complicated:
DOS and DOS-based OSes:
[1] iterate through physical drives assigning letters to primary
partitions in drive order, starting at C
Then
[2] iterate through all logical drives on each drive assigning letters

So if there is:

1:[(primary){extended(logical 1)(logical 2)}]
2: [(primary){extended(logical 1)(logical 2)}]

Then you will get this:

1:[(primary C:){extended(logical 1 E:)(logical 2 F:)}]
2: [(primary D:){extended(logical 1 G:)(logical 2 H:)}]

Drive letters are not in physical drive sequence.

Note: there is only 1 permitted primary per drive.

If you have >1 visible primary per drive, Win NT 3-4 would fail with a BSOD.

Win95B and on, which support FAT32, might handle it, but might also
fail to boot. I've never managed to pin down all variations.

Win2K could handle it but would BSOD if the partitions were not in
numerical order:

1:[(primary){extended(logical 1)(logical 2)}] <- fine, works
1:[(primary){extended(logical 2)(logical 1)}] <- BSOD on boot-up

XP could handle it.

Vista and on dump all the old DOS-based logic and use a new system.

But DOS is tricky these days. Many people have extracted "MS-DOS 7.1"
from Win98 and use it standalone. I *think* these variants *can*
handle >1 visible (unhidden) primary, but I have a suspicion that the
old FAT16-only versions can't.

But you're not meant to do this; it wasn't in the DOS design.
Additional primaries were for non-DOS OSes with formats that DOS can't
read: back then, Netware, Xenix, etc.

It may work in later versions, but I advise against totally relying on it.




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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual Boot winth Windows 98

[Bret Johnson]

>> The problem with this approach is that the programs are almost
>> never on C:, and they may not be on D: either.  The way I manage
>> that is to set myself up an S: ("System") drive which is where the
>> programs are located.  I use whatever tools I have available in the
>> DOS I'm using to do that (usually SUBST or SWSUBST, but e.g. in
>> DOSBox I need to use MOUNT).  I have the programs and batch files
>> set up to assume S: instead of C: for the default drive.
>>
>> That's probably too complicated of a setup for most people, but is
>> how I do it.
>
> Aha. That's a good idea. Thank you -- I may try that.

Just as an FYI, if you're going to do something like that, as you're booting 
you'll also want to set up environment variable(s) to indicate which VM you're 
in and possibly which version/manufacturer of DOS you're using.  You may need 
that in some of the batch files since there are certain times when things work 
a little differently depending on the operating environment.

The main one that pops to mind right now is that I have a batch file called 
ETHERNET that sets up the LAN packet driver.  When I'm running in "real" DOS, 
the driver that needs to get loaded is the one for the real NIC in the 
computer.  In a VM the NIC is always virtualized, and exactly which NIC is 
virtualized varies by VM.  The ETHERNET.BAT file looks at the environment 
variables to determine which packet driver to load.  The ETHERNET.BAT file will 
also unload the packet driver if it is unloadable (some are and some aren't).

I know I have a few other batch files where the operating environment makes a 
difference, though most of the time it doesn't matter.  The main VM I have a 
problem with sometimes is DOSBox, since it's actually a Virtual DOS rather than 
just a Virtual Machine, so (among other things) not all of the DOS internal 
structures are there which causes problems with some programs.


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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual Boot winth Windows 98

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2022 at 01:52, Travis Siegel  wrote:
>
> Not true.

Sometimes true.

> If both of the partitions are primary partitions, and the bootable flag is 
> swapped from one to the other, then when one boots, the second will be drive 
> d:, and vice versa.

It depends on the OSes in use.

The formal DOS schema is:

[1 primary and then one extended containing multiple logical drives] x per drive

Letter allocation is complicated:
DOS and DOS-based OSes:
[1] iterate through physical drives assigning letters to primary
partitions in drive order, starting at C
Then
[2] iterate through all logical drives on each drive assigning letters

So if there is:

1:[(primary){extended(logical 1)(logical 2)}]
2: [(primary){extended(logical 1)(logical 2)}]

Then you will get this:

1:[(primary C:){extended(logical 1 E:)(logical 2 F:)}]
2: [(primary D:){extended(logical 1 G:)(logical 2 H:)}]

Drive letters are not in physical drive sequence.

Note: there is only 1 permitted primary per drive.

If you have >1 visible primary per drive, Win NT 3-4 would fail with a BSOD.

Win95B and on, which support FAT32, might handle it, but might also
fail to boot. I've never managed to pin down all variations.

Win2K could handle it but would BSOD if the partitions were not in
numerical order:

1:[(primary){extended(logical 1)(logical 2)}] <- fine, works
1:[(primary){extended(logical 2)(logical 1)}] <- BSOD on boot-up

XP could handle it.

Vista and on dump all the old DOS-based logic and use a new system.

But DOS is tricky these days. Many people have extracted "MS-DOS 7.1"
from Win98 and use it standalone. I *think* these variants *can*
handle >1 visible (unhidden) primary, but I have a suspicion that the
old FAT16-only versions can't.

But you're not meant to do this; it wasn't in the DOS design.
Additional primaries were for non-DOS OSes with formats that DOS can't
read: back then, Netware, Xenix, etc.

It may work in later versions, but I advise against totally relying on it.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com
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Re: [Freedos-user] Dual Boot winth Windows 98

[Björn Morell]

Hmm.

 I have two  primary partitions, Freedos and DrDos on a drive and only 
the active one is visible.


 I have 3 drives, first one has Damn Small Linux and LILO as boot 
manager second has Freedos and Drdos and the third Windows 95 (with Lite 
Step shell).


In DSL I can mount them all, booting to Freedos I can see Windows but 
not DrDos, if I boot to DrDos I can see Windows but not Freedos.


I have not tried regular fdisk though only xfdisk there one activates or 
deactivates and Show and Hide in fdisk there is only activate or 
deactivate so that could work, I guess you have to run fdisk and 
rebooteach time you want to change though.




Den 2022-02-12 kl. 01:50, skrev Travis Siegel:


Not true.

If both of the partitions are primary partitions, and the bootable 
flag is swapped from one to the other, then when one boots, the second 
will be drive d:, and vice versa.  I used to use the fdisk method all 
the time, I dual booted linux, and dos, so I see no reason why it 
wouldn't work with windows and dos as well.  Obviously,, I couldn't 
access the linux partition from dos, because it didn't read the linux 
file system, but linux had no trouble seeing the dos partition, and 
another friend I had used dos/windows (as requested in the original 
post), and that worked just fine, he could see both drives no matter 
which os he booted.


Obviously, I've not tried this in years, but I see no reason why 
things would have changed in this regard.



On 2/11/2022 5:08 PM, Björn Morell wrote:


If you want to access one from the other you cannot as it will be 
hidden, for that to work you need separat drives or the coplcated 
method, if not xfdisk on a bootable floppy or usb will be handy while 
installing.


Den 2022-02-11 kl. 22:14, skrev [GlassNerves] via Freedos-user:

Thanks for the answers guys. I see i have a lot of options.
I don't wanna to install FreeDOS in the same partition of Windows 98 
because this is complicated as hell. I will make two partitions and 
will be using the xfdisk method.


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--- Original Message ---
Em sexta-feira, 11 de fevereiro de 2022 às 2:36 AM, [GlassNerves] 
 escreveu:

Using only one HD, is this possible or can cause some conflit?

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