Mail Archives: opendos/1999/04/16/05:44:03
On Thu, 15 Apr 1999 Dan de Haan asked:
> It is at all possable to make DR-DOS 7.03 (or any other) boot from a
> second hard drive?
DR-OpenDOS 7.02 and DR-DOS 7.02 had a provision to actually boot
out of other physical hard disks than 80h (if you had a modified MBR
and Boot Sector, that preserved the DL register value), but this has
been backed out for some compatibility issue on systems with strange
partitioning schemes. As you can see in the history log DR-DOS 7.03,
does no longer support this. Even if you load IBMBIO.COM of some
other disk (by using a boot loader for example), IBMBIO.COM will
start searching for IBMDOS.COM and [D]CONFIG.SYS on drive 80h,
looking for a valid C: partition.
With a little bit of thinking about it, I m sure it would be easy
to reenable this enhancement without introducing other problems,
but unfortunately I don t know the specific case for why this has
been backed out.
Of course, you can semi-boot-of-other-harddisks by logically
swapping their order (80h, 81h, 82h, 83h) in the ROM-BIOS setup,
but this will mix up your DOS drive letter assignments.
> I as many people just bought a new hard drive, this one (8.4G) is a
> fat32 drive and therefore you cannot boot DRDOS off of it. and Win98
> will not boot off a second drive.
As far as I have heart, Windows 95 and 98 don t have problems
to be installed on other drives than C: (some applications
*do* have problems), so it should be possible to install it
on other physical drives then 80h, too. However, it is a requirement
that the boot files reside on 80h (usually C:), but this can be
FAT16. If you physically swap your hard disk, reinstall Windows 98
on D: (FAT32, leaving C: in FAT16 format) and then install DR-DOS
on C: using LOADER, things might work.
Good luck!
Matthias
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Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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