Re: quick question about dosemu

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David Henderson <dhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Good morning!  You are correct that multiple people have mentioned
> that, and it may be true.  I do know that chdsk can run during the
> boot cycle which does not yet have a graphical environment to run,
> hence my thoughts on it being a console based executable.  I will play
> with it to see if that is indeed the case, or it if is as the others
> have stated that it is not.  I'll report back once I get things going.
> It will require me to compile dosemu for this particular distro
> through, so a couple of extra steps are required...
>
> Keep your fingers crossed people!!!

I'm certainly not an expert on dosemu or DOS internals, but I think the
mistake you may be making here is assuming that because CHKDSK is a CLI
program, that it's DOS.  That would have been a poor assumption even in
the days when Windows was DOS-based (95/98/ME), but an even poorer
assumption for a program that can fix NTFS filesystems, typically found
on Windows versions that are not DOS based at all.

It is completely possible for a program in Microsoft-world to have no
GUI, run in a command prompt window, be batch-scriptable, and still be
linked against Windows DLL's, assume that Windows is running, and
basically be in all respects a WIN32 executable that DOS could not
support.  In fact, as more and more time goes on (and the Age of DOS
recedes into the past), this becomes more certain of just about any
Windows CLI program you run into.

When Windows started, it was a GUI that sat on top of DOS, and a lot of
it depended on DOS, but even then, a CLI-only yet Windows-native program
was possible.  One of the purposes of Windows NT (as compared to
previous versions of Windows) was to create a new form of Windows that
would have no DOS underneath it at all.  Since it is NT which gave us
NTFS filesystem, any program that can fix NTFS problems would be
expected to come from that world, the world of NT-based Windows flavors
where DOS does not exist.  (And no, the CMD.EXE command window offered
on NT-based Windows versions is not really MS-DOS, much as it strongly
resembles it.)  All modern Windows flavors (NT/2000/XP/Vista/10) are
descended from this NT-based form of Windows that does not have any true
DOS in it.  It is highly unlikely you could get any EXE files from these
OS's to run from a DOS prompt, even on real PC hardware running real
DOS, even if they were CLI programs.

It's a long shot, but if anything, you might have more luck trying to
run CHKDSK on Wine than in dosemu, since at least Wine is meant to run
WIN32 executables, and wouldn't necessarily need them to have a GUI.  I
think probably the only reliable way to do a full repair on an NTFS
partition on UNIX would be in a full virtual machine session running
Windows in the VM (QEMU, Xen, VMware, etc.).

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