Message-Id: Date: Fri, 02 Jan 1998 11:01:52 +0000 From: Matthias Paul To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: LOADER Problems Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Precedence: bulk On 98-01-01 Glenn E. Davis reported: >I had OD702B2 on there before and Win95 installed over it (ok... that's fine with me). Ok, then you have already managed to work-around the most common problem with this configuration these days: FAT32, which - on new PCs - will be installed by recent versions of Win95, if you do not explicitly de-select it in the "manual" installation. >I briefly see "IBMBIO.COM", the screen clears, the system locks up... Hm, my first guess is that Windows95 SETUP has messed up OpenDOS original configuration files, and re-installing OpenDOS some of these changes have not been corrected by OpenDOS SETUP. >Oh. I have an OS/2 Primary Partition.A very small DOS/Win95 Primary partition. >A FAT16 shared Extended partition (A few OS/2 extended partitions also) and >The OS/2 Boot Manager Partition. All this should not be a problem, at least, I have been able to successfully use similar partition configurations (at least if these partitions were on *one* physical drive). >I put Win95 and OpenDOS on the D: drive and all their boot files appear to be >on the C: drive. Just to avoid any misinterpretation on my party, what do you mean by "D: drive" here? Actually the drive letter assigned to a partition, or do you mean a 2nd hard disk? If the two primary partitions you have are located on the same physical drive (OS/2 FDISK can do this), your DOS/Win95 primary partition should have been assigned to drive letter C:, not D:. If you have two harddisk, the DOS/Win95 primary partition will be on drive D:, with the unusual setup of an OS/2 (I guess HPFS???) partition as drive C:. I m not sure, if Win95 or OpenDOS would skip such a partition when assigning drive letters (but it could be, that they behave differently). Depending on one or the other, OpenDOS could be misleaded by the boot unit as reported by LOADER, and attempt to boot from an unaccessable HPFS partition. Well, might just be wild speculation given the current info concerning your system... At least, OpenDOS 7.02 B2+ supports booting from any *primary* FAT partition of any *physical* drive. But both, the MBR and the boot sector (or their equivalents emulated by a boot loader like LOADER) need to have proper values for this configuration, which are currently *not* maintained by OpenDOS tools. If IBMBIO.COM searches for IBMDOS.COM and CONFIG.SYS on the wrong drive (usually drive C:), this is an indication, that something is wrong here. So you might need to patch these sectors to actually force a boot from other drives. To see, how far OpenDOS boot process goes before it crashes, please switch on before you attempt to boot OpenDOS (that is here, before you press F2 while within LOADER). This will enter OpenDOS DIAG mode. Press while the message "Starting Caldera OpenDOS..." is displayed (if). Depending on the displayed messages, afterwards we d know, if IBMBIO.COM was loaded by LOADER, if it was successfully able to load IBMDOS.COM (on which drive) and to find [O[D]]CONFIG.???. You ve probably not come so far, but if, please verify, that SHELL= points to a command processor other than MS-DOS/Windows. (e.g. SHELL=C:\OPENDOS\COMMAND.COM C:\OPENDOS\ /E:512 /P >If anyone needs to see my Config.sys autoexec.bat (or ODs equivalent) let me know. This, and more info concerning your partitioning and drive usage could be helpful. Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------ Matthias Paul eMail: Web: http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html