On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
> I think now that it may not be able to get this disk to boot; this is
> dos6.2 which is pretty old; the drive it had worked on before was a win98
> installation.
Well the lilo README in /usr/doc/lilo-* (or /usr/share/doc),
which is really a text version of the postscript manual, says:
MAP-DRIVE=<bios_device_code> Instructs chain.b to installs a resident
driver that re-maps the floppy or hard disk drives. This way, one can
boot any operating system from a hard disk different from the first
one, as long as that operating system uses _only_ the BIOS to access
that hard disk.* This is known to work for PC/MS-DOS.
* So you should be very suspicious if the operating system requires
any specific configuration or even drivers to use the disk it is
booted from. Since there is a general trend to use optimized
drivers to fully exploit the hardware capabilities (e.g.
non-blocking disk access), booting systems from the second disk may
become increasingly difficult.
> I went into dos and did fdisk; I had to change to disk 2 in the
> program, and when I went into the option for activating a dos
> partition, it said only partitions on disk 1 could be made
> active.
If I remember right, when lilo is on the MBR, the boot active
flag is irrelevant (you might want to double check the manual
cited above -- it explains the boot process in more detail than
the average person would want or need).
> Theoretically, the use of "map-drive" might work around this
> problem, but I don't think it works in this case.
Quite possibly, as the passage quoted above shows.
> So it looks like I either just keep on booting into dos with a
> floppy, which is no big deal, or experiment with dosemu, or a
> combination of the two.
Dosemu is a great utility, runs most things, and is highly
configurable. I downloaded the dosemu from Caldera a few years
ago, and they included DR-DOS with it, for free. DR-DOS is far
superior to any dos ever produced by M$, including the Dos 7
bundled with win9x, and can be substituted under win9x for the
native M$-DOG 7. Yes, win9x is STILL a graphical add on for
MS-DOG, just as win3.1 was: Caldera won a huge settlement in
their lawsuit against M$, partly because of the illegal
monopolistic bundling (the ability to substitute DR-DOS was a
great court demo, as you can imagine). You might go to their
site and see what you can get now. They split into 2
subsidiaries: calderasystems.com, and Lineo, which has been
marketing DR-DOS for embedded systems, but the dosemu packages
may be in the calderasystems.com web or ftp directory tree
(haven't been there in a while). Of course, DR-DOS can also be
used independently, and includes real, usable multitasking and
networking, along with a superior help system. Caldera uses
their own changed rpm packaging scheme, so you may have to
convert with the alien utility, or something.
Dosemu from other distributions includes a developing freedos,
with a bunch of unix like shell utilities for dos, which helps
the normal DOS brain damage a lot. I don't know whether freedos
can run independently yet: it actually might not matter.
LCR
--
L. C. Robinson
reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid
People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and
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out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see
"CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html