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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] FreeDOS defrag vs Win98
  • Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 07:06:00 +0000 (UTC)

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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