Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 12:30:36 +0100 From: Matthias Paul Subject: Re: DR-DOS on 2nd HD To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Message-id: <2E3CCF16EB4@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de> Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany eMail: Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html -------------------------------------------------------------------