From: "Matthias Paul" Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 18:11:37 +0100 Subject: Re: DR-DOS, PTS-DOS, FreeDOS, Win X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22 Message-ID: <5BCFBD524A7@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de> Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com On Sun, 26 Mar 2000 Florian Xaver wrote: > If I use one, it try to start Lineo Dr-DOS 7.03 but then the PC hangs. > [...] > Or can I use LOADER.COM more than 2 OS? > I tried it, but it didn't go. You can use LOADER to load more than 2 OS, just by adding lines in the BOOT.LST (or whatever name you chosed, see LOADER /? for details). However, besides any OS of the DRI family, it provides direct support only for *old* issues of MS-DOS/PC DOS and OS/2 (Reportely Warp 3 works, too). I don t think they will work for current issues of MS-DOS/PC DOS. So for all other OS you only have F1=Standard Boot. This will work with *any* OS, since it just spawns control to the boot sector, which knows how to boot the OS (whatever it is). Of course, since there is only one boot sector, this only works for *one* alternative OS (which could have it s own boot manager like NT s FlexBoot, OS/2 BootManager, or Windows 9x dual boot). I haven t tried, but since PTS/DOS and FreeDOS also don t depend on the physical position of the kernel files on the disk, you should be able to boot Windows etc. via F1, and load PTS/DOS and FreeDOS via LOADER s binary image option (type B). At least you could write a small stub (very similar to a normal boot sector) to be loaded by that option, that then spawns these kernels. PTS/DOS should also have means to boot other OS by loading alternative boot sectors from CONFIG.SYS. This should also work for DR-DOS. The PTS/DOS SYS utility (and my privately enhanced DR-DOS SYS) has an option to retrieve a boot sector from disk, but you can also use DEBUG for this. (I don t remember, if PTS/DOS can directly boot foreign kernel files bypassing the boot sector file method). If this does not work for DR-DOS 7.03, to isolate the problem please try Novell DOS 7, OpenDOS 7.01, or DR-OpenDOS 7.02, or DR-DOS 7.02 without 7.03 updates. Newer issues had a second level BIOS compression method (named "Wrapper") added to reduce the file s size. (If the IBMBIO.COM file has a message "Not enough memory" at the very start of the file, then it is using Wrapper.) While it works most of the time, I found a number of issues with Wrapper, that could in some scenarios prevent it from properly decompressing and starting the BIOS. It would be interesting to me, if your problem could be related to this... One last note regarding PTS/BootManager (which I haven t used yet). AFAIK it uses (besides others) partition ID 42h for Linux and DR-DOS partitions. This ID was also used by Peter Gutman s Secure File System (SFS). I haven t verified this, but reportedly Windows 2000 also just uses this ID for its new Dynamic Disks (although there have still been around 50-100 other free IDs, including a large number reserved by Microsoft)... But that s the old game; mind, NTFS having the same ID as HPFS, or VFAT using fields in the directory entries already used by DR-DOS years earlier... While this is no direct solution for your problem, I still hope the info helps a little further, Matthias ------------------------------------------------------------------- Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany eMail: Web : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html -------------------------------------------------------------------