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["Jim Howard" <jmhoward AT texramp.net>]

There is a version of MS-DOS that will run without Win98. It is called
MS-DOS 7.10 . Someone got permission from Microsoft to GNU GPL license it. I
run it on my system and it appears to work fine. I was trying to locate the
url where I downloaded it from. You might do a search on the internet for
it.

james

-----Original Message-----
From: baslinux-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:baslinux-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of sindi keesan
Sent: Friday, November 26, 2004 1:23 PM
To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [BL] FreeDOS defrag vs Win98


I am looking for a way to use Win98 DOS without needing to use Win98, on a
DOS/linux computer, that will let me defrag without having to boot some
other DOS from a floppy disk first.

Boot with Win98 DOS (three system files).

MS-DOS defrag  - says it needs DOS 6.0 or later (apparently 7 is not
later)

FreeDOS - starts to defrag.   Windows then puts a message on the screen
telling me it has disabled direct disk access to protect long file names
and to read about LOCK command.  I read in a book - you need to unlock the
drive to allow scandisk or defrag to operate on it (in 16-bit mode).  The
FreeDOS blue display is gone, but FreeDOS continues to do Wr's anyway.

FreeDOS appears to work on a 16-bit DOS partition even under Win98 DOS.

We also tried booting with a FreeDOS boot disk and running FreeDOS defrag.
Same results but this time you can see more than just one characters of W
or r at a time.  Both times it reported a problem midway through and
stopped defragging (corrupted file).

FreeDOS appears to be automatically unlocking Win98's lock.

Unfortunately, running FreeDOS this way appears to have really messed
things up.  We are now running Windows scandisk and it reports a large
number of files that are damaged or of misreported size.

The Win98 CAB files are in this partition, which might be one of the
problems (long file names).  We can always restore them from CD.  But a
lot of DOS utilities and other files (jpg's) also got the wrong file size.
Scandisk says it fixed them.  While fixing other things it filled up the
drive and I had to delete some stored files.  Still going.....

So it may not be a safe thing to run Freedos defrag after doing a Win98
boot.  It should be tested further on a drive with unimportant files.
Perhaps I should notify FreeDOS to warn people rather than just bypassing
the Win98 lock.

I think I will run FreeDOS defrag from a FreeDOS boot disk if I switch to
Win98 DOS to fix my linux boot problem.   Or more likely switch hard
drives and cards over to the ASUS from the Win98 computer and hope Win98
is happy in the ASUS motherboard.  The Gateway where it lives now won't
boot loop BL3 with Win98 anyway (and will with any other DOS).  Kernel
panic, attempt to access beyond end of device.  Maybe some conflict
between how we formatted (some other DOS, or PQ-MAGIC) and Win98?





keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
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