#284 FreeDOS 1.3 Release Candidate 3 Floppy Diskette Edition - Impossible to pass partitions creation step
Good morning,
When I try to install FreeDOS 1.3 Release Candidate 3 Floppy Diskette Edition in VMware, it creates the partitions automatically and asks for a reboot, which is ok, but then, after the reboot, it says that it failed creating the partitions (and that happens because they were already created, of course) and it opens FDISK. In FDISK, you can see the partitions already exist, so I pressed "ESC". Then it asks for a reboot for applying the changes, even if there's nothing to apply, but if you ask for a reboot, then it will go back to FDISK. I tried to delete all the partitions and then rebooting, that made the automatic process re-create them and ask for a reboot, but after the reboot the same happens. This means there's no way to start the installation because is impossible to pass the step of creating the partitions (they create but it asks for creating them).
There is a fat chance that you stumbled on a FAT16/FAT32 file system issue.
See this thread on the developer's mailing list https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/mailman/freedos-devel/thread/e97caaca-af4f-d839-4e26-71d0bd8189d4%40jpberlin.de/#msg37031204
In short form, the Floppy DIskette Edition, during instalation, runs optimized for a 8086 CPU, and the corresponding FDISK is not linked with FAT32 support. If your virtual disk is above 2G, well ... it will fail a way or another (either during partition or formatting)
Try it first with a small virtual disk (256M is more than enough to host a full installation), to verify the installation procedure w/o this "feature". But see my ticket #286 in case it is not environment dependant.
As a workaround you could partition and format the virtual disk via the LiveCD Version.
PS. I'm only an very recent end user, but i do hate bug reports unanswered
I got a message that the developers are working on an update of the instalation procedure for the forthcoming RC4.
Just for completitude, I did a test of the floppy install under QEMU. In my case it fails during partition creation (as per my #286 ticket) but once created the partition with FDISK manually (btw. no problem with virtual disk sizes) it fails with a message
Unable to locate installation packages
Both the LiveCD/CD/USB stick installer (FDI) and the Floppy Only Edition (FDI-x86) used similar logic to detect the need for hard disk partitioning. The problem that caused both installers to get stuck with a partitioned but unformatted disk was found shortly after the release of RC3 and the installers have been updated. Hopefullly, it will completely resolve the issue for RC4.
I think this was resolved with 1.3-RC4