Message-Id: <3.0.1.16.19970326152010.6c6f8faa@pop.verisim.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 15:20:10 -0500
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
From: Takashi Toyooka <ttoyooka AT verisim DOT com>
Subject: Re: running opendos with win 95
Cc: opendos AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <9703261120.ZM3398@caldera.com>
References: <jruby AT pressenter DOT com        "running opendos with win 95" (Mar 25, 11:08pm)>
 <m0w9kwu-000043C AT pressenter DOT com>
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At 11:20 1997/03/26 -0700, Tim Bird wrote:
>jruby AT pressenter DOT com wrote:
>> Is it possable to install open dos on a machine running win 95?
>> If so, how well will it get along with win 95?
>
>Not well.  Win95 is more closely "knit" with MSDOS 7.0 than was
>Windows 3.1 with earlier MSDOS versions.  I believe it is possible
>to dual boot them, but I think it is not possible (at the moment)
>to boot Win95 on top of OpenDOS.  I haven't set up dual booting
>for Windows 95 (I have for Linux) but I understand that Win95 "resists" it.

Not really.  At least - if you install Win95 on top of a previously
installed older version of MS-DOS, it will save your old startup files
and allow you to boot into your previous version of DOS (press F4 on
startup).  I'm not sure if Win95 will be gracious enough to do this
for OpenDOS.  I'm feeling charitable today; my guess is that it will.
However, as Tim Bird wrote, it will be a dual-boot system, you won't
actually have Win95 running *on top* of OpenDOS.

>Also, OpenDOS will not recognize or use long filenames.  Under OpenDOS,
>you will just see mangled directories and filename for anything longer
>than 8.3.

Yup.  All caveats related to using both LFN and SFN on one FS apply.

Actually, as I write, I'm getting less and less sure that Win95 will
act nicely when installed over OpenDOS.  It overwrites MS-DOS's old
IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS with its own versions of those files.  It all
depends on how much Win95 *expects* those particular files to be
there, and how it reacts when it finds that the system files are
actually called something else.  I'm not sure any more.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Takashi Toyooka <ttoyooka AT pobox DOT com>                     Verisim, Inc.
http://www.magi.com/~ttoyooka/                 http://www.verisim.com/