Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Mon, 1 Nov 2004, sindi keesan wrote:

> Win9X DOS, DR-DOS 7.03, or PC-DOS --- and only FreeDOS would boot.
> Someone else had it working with Windows NT before that.  We got linux to
> work first with lilo (lilo on floppy disk) and then discovered FreeDOS
> would boot so we could use loadlin.  SBM (smart boot manager) let us boot
> DamnSmallLinux from a CD-ROM with lilo too.  But FreeDOS messes up Xvesa,
> says Hal, which leaves us either no Xvesa or needing to use lilo.   Will
> SBM let me choose between FreeDOS and lilo (BL2 or BL3)?

For SBM to boot Linux, you need to have lilo installed in the superblock
(sorry, don't know what that means, but I know that's how they say it) of
the partition it resides in.  This means something like it gets installed
to the first sectors of the partition, rather than to the mbr of the
drive.  Once you do that, sbm can boot linux fine.  My FreeDOS does *not*
mess up Xvesa.  I created a menu, with one item being "boot BL3:" that
item also bypasses memory management stuff.  In my experience, bypassing
memeory management stuff in FreeDOS allows Xvesa to run normally.  So,
it's alot like later versions of M$DOS in that respect.  I never reported
this to the FreeDOS team, but they might well be willing to work out what
the issues are if someone reports this as a bug.

James