[Freedos-devel] Fwd: CheckHDD for FreeDOS 1.2 Installer

[Jerome E. S. Jr. <je...@sh...>]

Hello and thanks for the info. Mostly, I’m needing to verify stuff. Except recently, 
I haven’t run any form of DOS years. 

For the most part, the utility needs to check that drive C:

	1) is partitioned.
	2) will be bootable after install.
	3) is formatted and ready for install.

> On Aug 30, 2015, at 5:49 PM, Rugxulo <ru...@gm...> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 4:31 PM, Jerome E. Shidel Jr. <je...@sh...> wrote:
>> 
>> I’m working on a utility to check the state of the hard disk drives prior to the installation of FreeDOS.
>> This utility “CheckHDD” will scan the system and figure out what the FreeDOS installer needs to
>> do to the drives for a successful install.
>> 
>> I’ve got a couple questions for you all.
>> 
>> Can FreeDOS be installed on a partition >2gb.
> 
> FAT32, yes. I have a 4 GB FAT32 partition on this machine.

I though that might be the case. But I wasn’t positive. Good to hear
it is not limited to FAT16 and can boot from FAT32.

> 
>> Will it work above the 2gb limit?
> 
> Not sure what this means. The maximum file size is still 2 GB (last I
> heard) although FAT32 (barely, via additional API) can support 4 GB-1
> files (in theory). Some old BIOSes might still have limits making it
> stick to 137 GB (or such?) unless some external fix (OnTrack??) is
> used.
> 
>> Will it boot from the second primary DOS partition on the same drive?
>> You get the idea.
> 
> You mean via vanilla SYS boot sector? I've not done a lot with that,
> but I think you can change the boot drive, yes. If not, I'm 99% sure
> that most boot managers (including "BOOT" BootMgr or Grub4DOS or
> whatever) can do similar.

Basically, I mean. Let’s say HDD0 is partitioned like so:

	0 - FAT16 w/MS-DOS installed. (not Hidden)
	1 - FAT32 w/FreeDOS installed and set to Active/Boot.

With or without using a boot loader. Will FreeDOS boot OK and 
use partition 1 for C: and 0 for D:?

Also, do you know if it will boot from an extended partition?

> 
>> After it figures stuff out, it will exit with an appropriate errorlevel for the FreeDOS installer to
>> process.
>> 
>> At present this is what I am thinking:
>> 
>> 7 - No Hard Drive Detected.
>> 
>>        Can’t find any physical hard drives.
>>        Either misconfigured controller, no drives, dead drive… etc
>>        Unless they want a boot floppy, cannot proceed.
>> 
>> 6 - No Primary DOS Partitions Found.
>> 
>>        You need to partition a drive for FreeDOS.
>> 
>> 5 - Primary Partition Not marked Bootable.
>> 
>>        C is not bootable, run fdisk and make it active or ignore and just install.
>> 
>> 4 - "Boot" partition not formatted.
>> 
>>        hey, you want to format C:?
> 
> Some of that is bound to (barely?) be supported by BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT.

I’m not familiar with BOOTFIX or WHICHFAT. 
> 
>> 3 - No Boot code in MBR.
>> 
>>        Um, won’t format /s  or sys c: fix this?
> 
> "format /s" just calls SYS, right? And SYS will update the boot sector
> (but probably not the partition table). Can't remember what FDISK /MBR
> does or when it's useful. (To be honest, I'm no expert, obviously, and
> this stuff gets confusing and arcane very quickly!)
> 
>> 2 -  “Boot” partition not on first hard disk drive and a dos partition is on there.
>> 
>>        Might be ok, if system is set to boot second hard disk drive first or boot loader
>>        like grub is being used.
>> 
>> 1 - Other DOS partitions sectors past 2 gb limit:
>> 
>>        I hear people are doing this and it is working for them.
>>        However, is not recommended.
>>        Warn user and proceed to install prompts.
> 
> It's FAT16 that is limited to 2 GB. Similar to "classic" MS-DOS 6.22
> (and Win95 pre-OSR 1 or whatever). But "most" modern DOSes (and
> compatibles) support FAT32, including FreeDOS.

Good. It will same me from having to do more big number math in assembly. :)

> 
>> 0 - No Issues found:
>> 
>>        Procedure to Install?
> 
> This stuff is hard to safely and conveniently test, so maybe setting
> up a VM (VirtualBox?) would be best (stating the obvious here, I don't
> have lots of throwaway physical machines to play with).

Very much so. I’m doing the dev testing in vmWare. That way I can just
add/remove drives etc.