[Freedos-devel] Booting other O/Ses from FreeDOS

So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a

running Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).

I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE, and I did not try to
run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start Windows from
FreeDOS. This said, I did not expect that to work, I just
noted what did happen.

NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...

Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work

The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.

There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot
part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was
a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was
6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...

However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.

Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?

Ralf

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Steve Nickolas

2016-12-30 04:52:09 UTC

So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a

running Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).

I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE, and I did not try to
run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start Windows from
FreeDOS. This said, I did not expect that to work, I just
noted what did happen.

NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...

I know 3.1 did in the past, with provisos, did that regress?

Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work

The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.

There's PC DOS 7 but that's another story for another day. ;)

However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.

Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?

Is there still a maintainer of loadlin?

-uso.

Ralf Quint

2016-12-30 08:04:11 UTC

Post by Ralf Quint
NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...

I know 3.1 did in the past, with provisos, did that regress?

Sorry but I am not aware that anyone has successfully been able to do
that...

Post by Ralf Quint
There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That "Boot
part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7, but never was
a standalone version of DOS. The last standalone version of MS-DOS was
6.22 and that is as far as FreeDOS can reasonably take it...

There's PC DOS 7 but that's another story for another day. ;)

Indeed. IBM's PC-DOS 7 is a completely different animal. IBM and MS-DOS
parted ways after MS/PC-DOS 4.x. IBM never had a v5, skipped straight to
6.1. And IBM was always "a number ahead" ever since (until the last
release of IBM DOS, which was PC-DOS 2000)

However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.;

Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?

Is there still a maintainer of loadlin?

Don't know, haven't had time to check yet. But if not, that might be a
reason why it might not work with FreeDOS... ;-)
Well, there is (supposed to be)

Post by Steve Nickolas
Hans Lermen got retired, so I took maintainship of loadlin. Here you can find
old revisions, as well as the newer 1.6f which should work with nowadays kernel
hg clone static-http://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/loadlin.hg/

The last version mentioned above is from September 2012...

Ralf

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Steve Nickolas

2016-12-30 14:57:00 UTC

Post by Ralf Quint
NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...

I know 3.1 did in the past, with provisos, did that regress?

Sorry but I am not aware that anyone has successfully been able to do
that...

*I* did it, but that was many years ago. I do remember the VDM didn't
work.

There's PC DOS 7 but that's another story for another day. ;)

Actually, IBM had 3 releases of version 5 (5.0, 5.00.1, 5.02) and the
first two were essentially identical to Microsoft's 5.0 and 5.0A.

-uso.

Ralf Quint

2016-12-30 17:15:11 UTC

Post by Steve Nickolas
*I* did it, but that was many years ago. I do remember the VDM didn't
work.

What I remember (granted, getting old LOL) was that someone had 3.0
starting but then couldn't do much beyond that. Not aware that anyone
every got it working (beyond a mere bootup) on 3.1 or Enhancded mode due
to memory manager issues.

Post by Steve Nickolas
Actually, IBM had 3 releases of version 5 (5.0, 5.00.1, 5.02) and the
first two were essentially identical to Microsoft's 5.0 and 5.0A.

Well, yes, but those were as you stated just OEM versions from M$, with
no IBM specifics beyond what any other OEM had, unlike the later
versions of PC-DOS. Can't see in PC-DOS 5.02 anything different but the
renamed IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM either...

Ralf

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Steve Nickolas

2016-12-30 19:26:21 UTC

Post by Steve Nickolas
*I* did it, but that was many years ago. I do remember the VDM didn't
work.

As far as memory management goes, Windows comes with its own himem.sys and
emm386.exe, which should probably be used in lieu of their FreeDOS
counterparts.

Post by Steve Nickolas
Actually, IBM had 3 releases of version 5 (5.0, 5.00.1, 5.02) and the
first two were essentially identical to Microsoft's 5.0 and 5.0A.

The two had been essentially identical since 3.2, though, after MS-DOS was
made more IBM-like in a late revision of 3.1. (3.3 and 4.0 were
apparently developed by IBM rather than Microsoft; this is certainly
evident on 4.0.)

5.02 actually has one difference from MS-DOS: interlnk, which was
introduced to MS-DOS 6, was present here as well (along with a couple of
the tools, like eject, which didn't show up in MS-DOS at all).

-uso.

Antony Gordon

2017-01-02 18:21:36 UTC

Try Loadlin with no memory managers installed.

So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a

running Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).

I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE, and I did not try to
run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start Windows from
FreeDOS. This said, I did not expect that to work, I just
noted what did happen.

NO version of Windows will start from FreeDOS, not 3.x nor any 9x...

Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work

The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.

However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.

Have you tried to contact the maintainer of loadlin about this?
Ralf
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Rugxulo

2016-12-30 15:52:39 UTC

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 6:00 PM, Jose Antonio Senna

Post by Jose Antonio Senna

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 6:16 PM, Jose Antonio Senna

I booted FreeDOS kernel 2042 from a floppy in a W98SE
machine, and it seems to run OK.

So no, it's not reasonable to expect FreeDOS to work under a
running Win95. It may be possible in theory (if someone
fixed the bugs), but nobody has done it (yet, AFAIK).

I did not say Win95, I said Win98SE,

Okay, but generally speaking, I'm referring to what limited rumor I've
heard about "Win9x", not uniquely specific to "Win95", per se. AFAIK,
all of the Win9x family share the same design (minus maybe WinME,
which is somewhat different about bootup or whatever).

I don't know the details first-hand, so I can't say for sure, just
that it's not expected to work with other DOSes. I'm pretty sure even
OpenDOS and EDR-DOS don't have the necessary fixes to run Win95, and I
don't think DR-DOS 7.03 does either. They lost a lot of money (and
maybe gave up) due to that incompatibility (although they did win a
lawsuit later on). At best, all you can do with DR-DOS 7.03 (by
default) is dual boot with Win95. Actually, I think explicitly the
rumor was that Novell gave up entirely on Novell DOS 7 once it was
announced that Win95 would come bundled with MS-DOS. Hence the
changing of ownership (yet again). You'd have to ask someone more
familiar with it (Matthias Paul?), but perhaps even he isn't
interested in discussing it.

The point is that none of the existing developers needed or wanted it
badly enough to "fix" it for FreeDOS, and such fixes are far from
obvious because it was not well-documented by MS (on purpose).

To be honest, since MS-DOS comes bundled with Win9x and (more or less)
works the same way, I don't see any disadvantage in just using that. I
don't understand the appeal of trying to run Win9x (of any kind) atop
FreeDOS (beyond morbid curiosity).

Maybe some kernel devs here can expound upon this further. Maybe I'm
the wrong one to still be talking about this since I don't know the
gory details.

Post by Jose Antonio Senna
and I did not try to
run FreeDos under Windows; I tried to start Windows from
FreeDOS. This said, I did not expect that to work, I just
noted what did happen.

Same difference, that's what I really meant: to combine running DOS
and Win9x together, they are basically inseparable.

Post by Jose Antonio Senna

Dunno, try Gujin (DOS version) instead, it should work

The point was not how to boot Linux, it was to show another
difference in behaviour between FreeDOS and MSDOS 7.
However, it would be nice if loadlin worked under FreeDOS.

Great, but lack of proper Loadlin functionality atop DOS is very low
priority. Very few people in Linux "want" a DOS install to boot from,
much less "need" it.

Tom Ehlert

2016-12-30 16:32:17 UTC

Post by Rugxulo
Maybe I'm
the wrong one to still be talking about this since I don't know the
gory details.

yep.

Tom

Bret Johnson

2016-12-30 15:58:50 UTC

Post by Ralf Quint
There is no MS-DOS 7, despite what people are trying to tell. That
"Boot part" if Windows 9x will identify itself as DOS version 7,
but never was a standalone version of DOS.

Actually, with a little bit of tweaking, it can be -- I do it all of the time. The two main things you need to do are to edit MSDOS.SYS (which is simply a text-based configuration file, not an executable file like it was in earlier versions of MS-DOS), and to "hide" (move or rename) a few files in the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND subdirectory. IIRC, those files are IFSHLP.SYS, HIMEM.SYS, and EMM386.EXE. The OS tries to install those programs automatically even if you don't want them (they are sort of like "hidden" lines in CONFIG.SYS, and are required to be installed if you actually run Windows 9x).

Also, I personally like to "mix and match" the MS-DOS utilities and the FreeDOS (and other non-MS) equivalent utilities. Sometimes I prefer the MS ones and other times I prefer one of the alternatives. I don't use Win 9x any more at all, but I use MS-DOS 7.x almost every day.
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Jose Antonio Senna

2017-01-03 23:59:49 UTC

Post by Antony Gordon
Try Loadlin with no memory managers installed.

Good idea. It worked.

I was using HIMEMX only, no EMM.
Removing the line in CONFIG.SYS much reduced available low
memory, but allowed Loadlin to boot Linux from DOS prompt.

Pity that is not possible to test with EMM only,
as JEMM386 requires a XMS manager to work.

Regards
JAS

Louis Santillan

2017-01-04 00:39:55 UTC

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Rugxulo

2017-01-04 00:56:07 UTC

Hi,

IIRC, BasicLinux and other UMSDOS Linuxes would not boot/load with
EMM386 as they would put the CPU into V86 mode. After such, loadlin,
et. al., could not recapture control of the CPU and reload the GDT.

I can't remember if DOS-Minix worked with XMS-only or not. But
certainly it would choke on EMM386. (Actually, it also choked on
modern big-RAM machines unless manually corrected.) Then again, that
was old Minix 2.0.4, not sure if that was ever continued working in
3.x series. (Similarly, UMSDOS has been dropped since Linux 2.6.x, or
so I thought.)

Are there any active distros that still come with Loadlin? For those
that don't use GRUB2, what do they use? Grub Legacy, presumably.

Rugxulo

2017-01-04 00:51:44 UTC