Author Topic: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?  (Read 11512 times)

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #15 on: December 26, 2020, 02:22:24 am »
Ok, so I hit another snag.  It seems my ArcaOS installation did not fix the MBR, which previously, and still, has GRUB.

So when I try to boot from the hard disk to continue with the installation, I get a grub error because it doesn't recognize the file system(s).

How do I fix this?

Dave Yeo

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #16 on: December 26, 2020, 02:33:41 am »
Ok, so I partitioned the machine in the following way.

Code: [Select]
         2,000 unformatted Primary
         2,000 unformatted Primary
->C:  5,005 unformatted Primary Startable
->F: 29,147 unformatted Logical Advanced/LVM
While installing ArcaOS in the 3rd primary as C: will work, I would have made it a Logical and perhaps E: That way after booting AOS, one of the DOS partitions can be C: and from what Roderick said, even the 2nd one could have been a Logical and not C: for FreeDos. (I have no experience with FreeDos)
Who knows, maybe you will want to try one of the Dos's under AOS instead of its included DOS. You could even have all 3 running in individual VDM's on the desktop if you chose and your graphics card is happy displaying a VDM on the desktop (not all are)
I hope this will work for a tripple boot system.  I am currently installing ArcaOS right now, in C: and F: as above.  Let's see how that works out.  I can do this as many times as I need.
« Last Edit: December 26, 2020, 02:48:12 pm by Martin Iturbide »

Dave Yeo

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #17 on: December 26, 2020, 02:40:34 am »
Ok, so I hit another snag.  It seems my ArcaOS installation did not fix the MBR, which previously, and still, has GRUB.

So when I try to boot from the hard disk to continue with the installation, I get a grub error because it doesn't recognize the file system(s).

How do I fix this?

IIRC, there is an option for installing airboot in the LVM that you can run from maintenance mode from the stick. Might be in the disk checker.
If ever want to dual boot Linux too, ideally you also create the partitions from AOS, including /boot and install grub there.

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #18 on: December 26, 2020, 10:03:55 pm »
Thank you, that did the trick.

The volume manager said nothing about Airboot, so I wasn't sure, but that's what shows up when I boot from the hard disk.  The ArcaOS installation is continuing now.  Hopefully smoothly.

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #19 on: December 26, 2020, 10:24:24 pm »
IIRC, there is an option for installing airboot in the LVM that you can run from maintenance mode from the stick. Might be in the disk checker.
If ever want to dual boot Linux too, ideally you also create the partitions from AOS, including /boot and install grub there.

I have no plans to install Linux on this machine; and given the partition layout previously, I probably can't now.  The GRUB was just a leftover from the Linux installation previously on the machine, before I got my hands on it.

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #20 on: December 26, 2020, 10:45:21 pm »
Ok, it looks like the ArcaOS installation finished successfully.

I am now trying the FreeDOS installer.  It picked up and detected one of the small partitions I'd left for DOS, at this time I don't know which one.  The installer is too newbie friendly, IMO, there didn't seem to be any way to choose partitions or partition layouts, so the advice was good, to do all the partitions with ArcaOS.

Dave Yeo

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #21 on: December 26, 2020, 10:51:29 pm »
The main reason for doing the partitioning from ArcaOS is that it is old (actually the under laying OS/2) and needs the partitions on a cylinder boundary.
You should be able to choose which primary is active, forget if airboot allows it or you have to use the logical volume manager.

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #22 on: December 26, 2020, 10:52:44 pm »
Ok, so the first results is that the FreeDOS installer messes up the MBR, which holds Airboot.

I'm going to attempt to fix that; but I have to wonder if I get my FreeDOS boot menu back.

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #23 on: December 26, 2020, 11:00:22 pm »
The main reason for doing the partitioning from ArcaOS is that it is old (actually the under laying OS/2) and needs the partitions on a cylinder boundary.
You should be able to choose which primary is active, forget if airboot allows it or you have to use the logical volume manager.
I see.

After installing Airboot again, it automatically picks up FreeDOS [which still has its boot menu, it's not part of the MBR] and ArcaOS; both boot normally.  I do not yet know if FreeDOS will pick up the other partition if I format it, nor what OS/2 will do.

I guess the next exercise is to see if I still have working MS-DOS media and what I can do to install it on a machine with no diskette drive.

myrkraverk

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #24 on: December 26, 2020, 11:04:27 pm »
I forgot about trying to see if I can have a logical volume to share data between MS-DOS, FreeDOS and OS/2.

In the worst case, I'll write a JFS driver for DOS [I hope it won't come to that.]

Dave Yeo

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Re: Dual (or tripple) booting ArcaOS and FreeDOS?
« Reply #25 on: December 27, 2020, 12:15:50 am »
Well, they all support FAT, some support FAT32 and there are HPFS drivers available for DOS https://hobbes.nmsu.edu/?search=HPFS&stype=any&sort=type_name&dir=%2Fpub%2Fdos
Drawbacks, FAT, 8.3 names generally under OS/2 and probably DOS 6.x along with a 2GB partition limit.
FAT32, slow, don't know if there is a driver for DOS 6.x, perhaps partition limits and 2-4GB file limit.
HPFS, limited to 64 GB partitions (actually in practice a bit smaller, like 60GB) and 2GB file size. Long chkdsk on large volumes.
Edit, quite possibly those DOS HPFS drivers have lower partition size limits, pinball.sys for NT is limited to 4.3GB or so partitions for example.

A JFS DOS driver would be interesting. The Linux JFS is a fork of the OS/2 JFS and generally handles OS/2 JFS, so that GPL code would be a start as the source is available.
« Last Edit: December 27, 2020, 12:17:48 am by Dave Yeo »