FreeDOS 1.0

The following documents an attempt to install FreeDOS on an old 2G drive that proved to have serious problems. I will repeat this someday on a healthy drive, and rewrite all this. It is March of 2007. I find that FreeDOS 1.0 is available. (my prior work was with 0.9 Beta). Among other things the iso image has grown from about 10M to 153M. So I find an old 2G IDE drive and get set to install onto it. I burn fdfullxx.iso onto a CDrom and boot it on my target machine (it is a Pentium-166 with 8M of RAM, and a bios modern enough to support a CDrom boot).

I delete the two partitions that were already on the hard drive and create one big one (FAT32) to cover the entire disk, let FreeDOS format it, and get on with the install. I worried a bit about this, but it seems that this is fine, and perhaps even a recommendable way to go (FreeDOS FAT32 supports up to 128G partitions).

My video card is a PCI ET6100 card, and I put a PCI SMC tulip chip based network card into the machine as well. I boot the CDROM and after partitioning and formatting, I am presented with a menu (I choose the install freeDOS option) and then the install goes through a sequence of package groups (and requires me to babysit the process hitting return several times for each package group). None of this seems to be documented anywhere, the game is boot the CDROM and follow your nose.

Once this is done, a bunch of automatic configuration is done and then you are asked if you want to install a packet driver, and it did seem to figure out I had a tulip card, and now it is trying to configure via DHCP (nobody told me about this!!) It gets me into a dialog bout installing opengmx, then launches off into another round of automatic configurization. While it is busy with this, I put the MAC address of my network card into my DHCP server machines config file and restart it to see what that will gain me. Finally the freeDOS install wants me to reboot.

But it CRASHES big time

OK, the reboot hits an illegal instruction in EMM386. I keep trying the reboot hoping one of the options will be lucky. Each of the 3 options regarding EMM and HIMEM give me different bad things, in one case, I get: 
UMB's unavailable!  (3 times), then "invalid opcode"
I try this using all 3 menu options and all blow up rather quickly in some fashion (a google search is interesting -- one reply scolds the poster for using an emulator he doesn't like, blaming that -- but I am getting the same error on real hardware -- another fellow says he only gets the error when there is no CD in the drive, not true for me, but I haven't tried all the options with a CD in)

There is growing evidence that the above problems were due to a bad hard drive.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org