Baslinux mailing list

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

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, sindi keesan wrote:

> Thanks.  FreeDOS defrag seems to work without 'permissions' from Windows but 
> destroyed a lot of files.  I read that defragd.exe can defrag LFN's okay.
>
> We got MS-DOS 7.10 and installed it to one drive that had Win98 on it and now 
> Win98 won't boot - but if you make one change in msdos.sys (?) it will boot 
> and then it is back to using its own DOS again.  I think we will stick with 
> defragging with Win98 on computers where we have Windows but put 7.10 on most 
> other computers.
>
> 7.10 works on ALL our computers so far.  If you have Win98 on already, it 
> assigns the drive letters correctly when you boot from 7.10 floppy disk. If 
> you have DR-DOS on there and boot from 7.10 floppy, it moves over all the 
> drive letters by one and uses C: for autoexec.bat and config.sys (the 
> original C: becomes D:, etc.) but linux will boot (on a computer where it 
> would not boot with loadlin after a DR-DOS boot- which by now is three DFIs, 
> one ASUS but the other is okay, and one Gateway but the other two are okay).
>
> We have not yet tried sys'ing the DFIs with DR-DOS to 7.10 to see if it finds 
> drives correctly but we have high hopes for it.


I copied my files from the DR-DOS drive to another drive, reformatted the 
first drive, sysed with 7.10, and copied the files back.

Instead of defragging, I will copy all the files from one DOS partition to 
another and back.  FreeDOS is still too unpredictable for me to want to 
use it.  On something like one third of our computers it will boot from 
floppy disk but not hard disk, and it won't work with SCSI cards.  It 
won't work with loadlin on three computers.  But it has a nicer fdisk and 
we will be using parts of it.


> We ran into some odd problems with FreeDOS.  On two Gateways (have not 
> checked the third) you cannot load dos=high with it or the boot crashes. 
> Something about himem.exe.  Also one of the Gateways will not read drives 
> that were changed from DR-DOS to FreeDOS but reads them if you reformat 
> (PQMAGIC) and then put FreeDOS on fresh.  We tried three drives.    So 
> FreeDOS is definitely still beta.  It also calls the only DOS partition hda4.


> So far 7.10 seems like the most predictable DOS - will work on all our 
> computers, and we hope it works with Xvesa like Win98 DOS does.  It is 
> supposed to handle long file names and fat32 but we have not tried that 
> either.

It works with Xvesa.