From: "Matthias Paul" Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 16:52:47 +0100 Subject: Re: Past of DR DOS (and FAT32 info) X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22 Message-ID: <484A2D7220C@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de> Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com On Thu, 09 Mar 2000 19:49:12 Charles Dye wrote: > Has anyone else found all the older kernels to be completely > munged? It looks to me like everything pre-Novell-7 has been > FTPed in text (not binary) mode. At any rate, I've never > managed to get any of them to work. Today seems to be "day of confirmation". Yes, I ran into the same problems, when I downloaded this stuff a while ago. Just yesterday I downloaded it again, just to make sure this wasn t a transmission error. The .ZIP archives are broken, and even if you can extract the files, they won t be bootable. Seems they have been uploaded in ASCII mode or something like that... Also, the archive named DR DOS 3.41B (or was it T???) actually seems to be either some incarnation of the rumored DR DOS 3.42, or am early beta of DR DOS 5.0 Leopard . However, I do have at least some of these DOS issues from other sources, including (if I remember correct right from the memory) a full file set of DOS Plus 1.2, DR DOS 3.31, 3.35 (from various OEMs), various issues of DR DOS 3.41, 5.0, 6.0 (including most of the patches), various issues of DR PalmDOS, DR DOS Panther , Novell DOS (updates 4-9 are missing from by backups, though), NetWare Lite, Personal NetWare, and probably all the OpenDOS 7.01, 7.02 Betas, DR-OpenDOS 7.02, DR-DOS 7.02, and finally 7.03 issues and updates. My personal much enhanced issues of the kernel, COMMAND, FDISK, FORMAT, SYS, LOADER, DISKCOPY, DISKCOMP, DOSKEY, NLSFUNC, EGA, COUNTRY, DISPLAY, NWCDEX, and many more, are feverishly waiting for Lineo to hopefully release DR-DOS under GPL (or something similar) so that the net community can ramp up new DOS desktop development for better migration and integration into a Linux and Win9x world. If this might become truth, I hope the potential free DR-DOS and existing FreeDOS developers will either team-up in friendship or at least will help each other in technology and resource exchange. (Although my personal favorite would remain DR-DOS, as it s much advanced in technology and proven on a multi-million installed base.) We would only need around 10-20 active experienced developers to have the ultimative multi-purpose DOS within a year, I m sure. BTW. There have been many queries about Caldera s/Lineo s FAT32 support. In the current issue of the German computer magazine c t (06/2000), they compare variour Crash Recovery Tools developed by Ontrack, Powerquest, and others. What they all have in common, is that they use DR-DOS to boot their stuff. At least the Ontrack product (free evaluation download at www.ontrack.com) includes the DRFAT32.SYS/.EXE drivers to access FAT32 partitions via the redirector interface. So, if you want to have a look, this is where to go to... ;-) For an overview of all the available options of the DRFAT32.SYS driver (to be loaded in CONFIG.SYS) just give it an invalid parameter line so that the driver shows its internal help screen, or have a look at the end of the binary in the file viewer like inside the NC. DRFAT32.SYS supports CHS and LBA access, however, the DRFAT32.EXE redirector (to be loaded in AUTOEXEC.BAT similar to NWCDEX) has some limitations with partitions beyond 8 GB, and unfortunately DPMS and EMS support are disabled in this release... The advantages of the redirector approach are, that people without FAT32 drives are happily off with a small unbloated kernel, that virus contamination etc. of the FAT32 partition is much more difficult as the partition can be write-protected, that this solution works with *any* DOS 3.3+ (and DR DOS 5.0+), as long as run on a 386+. And it is compatible with all old DOS disk tools not knowing of MS-DOS 7.10+ FAT32 changes in the kernel. Of course, this also has disadvantages: You cannot boot DR-DOS off a FAT32 drive, if loaded it consumes more memory than a native solution, and it s slower... Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany eMail: Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html -------------------------------------------------------------------