sys-freedos

Puppy 4.3.1 has a package called 'ms-sys', that I put in in anticipation that one day it would be put to use. That day came when I was playing around with the partitions in the internal SD card in Gecko Edubook. One of the things I did was setup dual-booting with FreeDOS and Puppy.

ms-sys will restore a Master Boot Record to just like the famous MSDOS command "fdisk /mbr" does. ms-sys gives options for different types of MSDOS/Windows MBRs. It can also write a boot record to a partition. This is a great tool for setting up any drive to be bootable.

However, I did run into difficulty with writing a boot record to a fat partition for booting FreeDOS. Then I discovered another similar tool, which is just for writing a boot record to a fat partition, specifically for the purpose of booting FreeDOS.

I have documented my usage of both these tools in this Gecko installation page:

http://puppylinux.com/baby-laptops/gecko-install.htm

I think that there might be commandline options in ms-sys that would get FreeDOS to boot, however sys-freedos is pretty simple and succeeded right-off, so I decided to make it into a PET package:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/quirky/pet_packages-quirky/sys-freedos-200706.pet

I have added this in Woof so that building any distro (dpup, upup, quirky, etc) will include sys-freedos.

Note that 'sys-freedos.pl' is a Perl script, however I created a sh script wrapper named 'sys-freedos'.

I plan to make more use of these utilities in the future, so want them to be in puppies by default.

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Comments

sys-freedos
Username: 8-bit
I was wondering if this could be used by Floppy Formatter to create a bootable dos disk? Does it give one just the boot sector or is a dos.sys included? I have not read any of the docs for it.

sys-freedos
Username: 8-bit
"I just got through doing a "sys-freedos -w /dev/sde" on a usb floppy drive. After it completed, I could not mount the drive! So it looks like it is a work in progress. I recovered using Floppy Formatter and making an MS DOS file system on the disk. I could then mount it.

sys-freedos
Username: BarryK
"8-bit, I think that sys-freedos is only intended to write a boot sector to a partition of a drive. So it can't handle floppies. I don't know about ms-sys, you would have to read the docs.

Tags: puppy