So I have bad news... I tried both dosemu and wine, but neither will run chkdsk. I even tried using another wine binary called wineconsole - no go there either. This sucks!!! But at least there is confirmation that it will not work. Thanks again for everyone's help! Dave On 9/24/18, David Henderson <dhenderson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Good afternoon Brent - thanks for the lengthy discussion! I come from > the pre-Windows era (DOS 5 and on) and can confirm 99% of everything > you stated below. I was, however, unaware that newer CLI executables > were not actually still DOS-based but instead linked against Windows > .dll files. What a shame! I was hoping that such a basic command > such as the modern chkdsk.exe would be able to use something like > dosemu to work. > > I am not sure that wine will fit into part of the project (since it is > command line only). The other side of it is graphical and will > therefore run X.org so wine could be a solution. I will probably > still attempt to see if by chance chkdsk.exe will run under dosemu, > although it is not looking good at this point per the discussions with > everyone. I will report back my findings just so everyone can have > confirmation one way or another - unless someone already has a working > dosemu and can quickly attempt a chkdsk run with it (I will have to > compile dosemu for my distro before attempting anything). > > Thanks again to everyone for the conversation - it was enlightening! > > Dave > > > > On 9/24/18, Brent Busby <brent@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> 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.). >> >
