Message-ID: <396920DC.C005E56F@home.com>
Date: Sun, 09 Jul 2000 18:03:24 -0700
From: David Rust <davidru AT home DOT com>
Organization: @Home Network
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en]C-AtHome0405  (Win95; U)
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Advanced DOS for Beginners
References: <Pine DOT LNX DOT 4 DOT 10 DOT 10007091935540 DOT 8702-100000 AT smarty DOT smart DOT net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com


Paul O Bartlett wrote:

>     This afternoon I downloaded DR-DOS 7.02 from Lineo to start to
> take a look at it.  Unless I overlooked something, I noticed that the
> documentation was somewhere between skimpy and nonexistent, on that
> site at least.

Okay I dug out my DR-DOS installation disks and I have DR-DOS 7.03. On the
first disk is a "What's New.txt" file that seems to indicate that DR-DOS
has a problem with FAT-32 but that FDISK recognizes it. I don't know why
the contradiction.

The "readme.txt" file on the same disk points out that if DR-DOS  finds
Win95 on the hard drive it automatically loads the dual boot option. This
was my experience and it worked very well. Unfortunately the computer that
I did this on has since been  reformatted, partitioned and set up as an NT
server. So I don't remember if I had Win95 in a FAT32 partition. I probably
did but I experiment so much, I lose track of what I've done and haven't
done :-) At any rate DR-DOS set up the dual boot for me so that I could
select between Win95 and DR-DOS at boot.

> However, I saved some old posts which have some URLs
> for some other sites which may have docs (I prefer to read the
> instructions before assembly), so I will take a look at them before
> pestering people with a lot of questions.

There is also a Help.bat file on that first disk that will unpack the DOS
BOOK help files that you might have overlooked.

>
>
>     But I do have a couple of items up front. It has been expressed
> on this list that DR-DOS 7.02 is preferable to 7.03 due to some bugs
> in the latter, which is why I downloaded 7.02.  But that directory
> on Lineo also has a subdirectory with a group of updates, I presume
> bug fixes.  (I downloaded them, too.)  Does anyone have any comments
> on the update files?

Nope 7.03 worked fine for me as is.

>
>     At the moment I have a fairly large C: drive.  If a disk has only a
> single partition on it, the old MS-DOS FDISK would in effect wipe out
> existing files when partitioning it.  Does DR-DOS's FDISK do the same?
> I would suppose so.  But I do want to keep Win98 around, and it would
> be a major pain to try to back up and then restore hundreds of MB of
> files.  Any ideas?  (My machine does have a 100MB-size Iomega Zipdrive,
> but even so it would be a tedious operation, especially with the need
> to make a new partition bootable if I want to be able to bring Win98
> back up.)

If DR-DOS will work with Win98 at all (FAT32?) I think it would create a
partition for itself only and not disturb the rest of your hard disk.
Again, this was how it worked for me with Win95 and a 2-Gig hard drive.....
Your experience may differ.

Good luck

Dave

>