Mail Archives: opendos/1997/04/17/13:25:32
On Thu, 17 Apr 1997 Evan Dickinson wrote:
> Using dconfig.sys works, OpenDOS won't execute config.sys after
> dconfig.sys. You can't, however, chain to a batch file from
> config.sys. OpenDOS thinks the batch file is supposed to be part
> of config.sys. So you still need the 'if "%config%" ...' line in
> autoexec.bat.
My following comments will go a bit beyond the original topic of Win95
and OpenDOS, but I still hope, they might be interesting to some
of you, when trying to have multiple OS installed on the same drive...
You can give the name of the actual AUTOEXEC.BAT file
with the CONFIG.SYS SHELL= directive using /P[:autoexec.bat]
or /K:autoexec.bat, depending on what you want to do..., e.g.
SHELL=c:\opendos\command.com /P:auto_od.bat
Also, batchfiles can be executed as part of CONFIG.SYS when
temporary loading a command processor using
INSTALL=c:\opendos\command.com /c batchjob.bat
However, this method has a design flaw, causing the pre-environment
to be 'closed', that is, no more pre-environment variables can be
set, and later - when loading the permanent command shell - the
pre-environment is empty. Using 4DOS as a temporary command
interpreter instead of COMMAND.COM will avoid this problem.
After all, a major problem is two (or more) operating systems trying
to use the same configuration files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Fortunately, since DR DOS 6.0 the DRI crew had already implemented
a very nice but undocumented workaround (and it's still present in
Novell DOS 7 and OpenDOS 7.01 :-) ):
The SYS utility has an undocumented option /DR:ext.
Using this option, you can change the filename extension of
the system and configuration files from their defaults to "ext".
While making the media bootable, SYS also patches the boot sector
and system files to use the new extension. This feature was probably
introduced to allow coexistence of PC-DOS and DR DOS 6.0, since they
used the same system file names. But you can also have multiple
copies of DR DOS 6.0, Novell DOS (e.g. all the updates), and OpenDOS
simultanously installed on the same drive (selectable by a boot
manager like LOADER etc.), and each using its own system and
configuration files. Extensions could be for example "DR6",
"NW7", "U01", "U02", ... "U15", "OD7", ...
To better understand what will actually happen to the files just try:
c:\>SYS a: /DR:od7
and after this, have a look at the filenames on that drive... ;-)
Hope this could help a little,
Matthias
PS: More info on this topic can be found in NWDOSTIP.TXT
(from MPDOSTIP.ZIP).
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