Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, James Miller wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Take a look here: http://newdos.yginfo.net/msdos71/ .  What you need may
> be available for download there.  It was last time I looked, anyway.

It certainly was there and we downloaded and got it unzipped and 
transfered the image files to three floppy disks.  We had some 
trouble finding three perfect disks so it got to be 2 am and we will 
try this DOS out tomorrow.  Thanks to both you and the other list member 
who told us about this DOS.  Exciting!

In the meantime, the Gateway from which I moved the Win98/DOS/linux drives 
(to the Asus because that computer needed Win98 DOS to boot linux) turns 
out to not boot linux without Win98 (tho it appeared to do so a while back 
from boot floppy).  In fact it won't boot most linuxes at all.  From 
d:\bl2 it boots ramdisk linux, from c:\bl2 it tells me 'not an image file' 
(I have copied zimage from d:\bl2 to c:\bl2), and boothd from either gets 
us 'kernel panic'.  (This used to happen to me only with loop linux and 
could be cured by using a different DOS than Win98).  This computer 
appears to be best left to Windows and DOS, but it won't even boot from a 
FreeDOS-sys'ed drive that used to have DR-DOS on it (it will if you 
reformat and put FreeDOS on fresh).  I think linux is like the canary in 
the mines - it indicates something is going wrong as it pushes the 
hardware to the limits.  I had one other symptom - Syschk said to add D=64 
after emm386 because there was a memory management problem.

So we decided after a few hours of moving drives around and reformatting 
them to abandon both the Gateway and this version of Freedos, and we put 
the drives and cards back into the DFI that they came from, which gets 
'not an image file' sometimes if you boot from DR-DOS or FreeDOS, but 
ALWAYS works with Win98 DOS, and should do beautifully with MS-DOS 7.10. 
It looks like they use some programs that are also in FreeDOS, along with 
the basic DOS files.

I think 'not an image file' may be a sign of impending doom, but will use 
the computers until they complain more loudly.

I still don't know why the ASUS stopped working right the second time we 
put the same drives in, or why the linux drive stopped booting as soon as 
we moved it, or why the Gateway went bad as soon as we changed the drives. 
Perhaps this overstressed all the hardware somehow?  A mystery.

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