Re[2]: DOS 4 and higher...

[Radek Svaqr <ignor@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Stewart,

Wednesday, January 26, 2000, 7:04:12 AM, you wrote:



SM> Radek Svaqr wrote:

>> Also I've heard somewhere that DOS5.0 booted from PC3k floppy will not
>> recognize any other drives. It may support this idea that IO.SYS must
>> be adapted... But I am not sure wheter is this true. (Hi Stewart can
>> you confirm it?)

SM> Hi Radek, I confess I do not know how you would boot any other version of
SM> DOS, since the boot process in the ROM.  Only after c:\config.sys (which
SM> you can not change) is processed does the PC3k load d:\config.sys (which
SM> you *can* change).

SM> One idea might be to format an SRAM card with another DOS Version, and make
SM> it bootable.  You do this by, say, booting a laptop with DOS 5, then put
SM> the SRAM in the laptop's PCMCIA slot and use sys.com to copy the OS over to
SM> the SRAM.   I may have done this once but don't recall it working. If
SM> anyone else has had success, please let me know!

I tried a lots of older(=smaller) operating systems on SRAM Card. DR-DOS,
Novell DOS, PC DOS. NONE of them worked! Usually freezed without any message.
DR DOS showed highest inteligence: Message "Cannot boot" Seems that the only
one OS you can boot from SRAM is adapted DOS 3.3 which is already in
ROM. (Yes PC3K DOS is booting from SRAM, or from E:drive, etc..)
I didn't tried MS-DOS 4.0 and above because it is not possible to
transfer it via serial network when you are running DOS 3.3 (Under DOS
5.0 it is already posibble) But what I've heart somebody
transfered it on notebook and it didn't work..



SM> Since you can boot Linux from DOS, I did have an idea to load Linux on the
SM> PC3k, but even the smallest distributions of Linux with any real
SM> functionality need at least 8 MB, and at least a 386 processor.

There is a some kind of Linux for XT. Ask in forum which is at
http://come.to/xtcomputers for details.

SM> If you still want to play with other OS, you can try Geoworks 1.2, which I
SM> have done. It gives a GUI and several tools like word processor, terminal,
SM> database, but the poor CPU is struggling to keep with the demands. Same
SM> thing with Windows 3.0, which I have also loaded on there.  By the time you
SM> load Win3.0 and a tool like Write, you have little RAM left, and response
SM> is very slow.

That is right. And I have a good news especially for you. I installed
GEOS 2.1 and it is WORKING (Well I run it once time because I've
installed it today mornig and had no time for playing with it.])
I have it on my paralel harddrive. There were some problems during
installation (still wanted to write to drive C: but it is working.

BTW: Where can I get Geoworks 1.2? It is very old and already not
supported. GEOS 2.1 is quiet big. (about 8MB but I will try to decrase
it under 2MB)

SM> One last thing to look at is DR DOS.  It may be possible to have more boot
SM> options with it, thought this is purely speculation on my part.

Yes. "Cannot boot" :-((

SM> When you consider all the options, good old DOS doesn't look so bad!  And
SM> with a 10 or 20 MB memory card, you can do just about everything you would
SM> want to on the PC3k anyway.  And if you don't find what you need for
SM> software, well, there's always Visual Basic for DOS which you can use to
SM> "roll your own".

I agree that DOS 3.3 is sufficient. But has some bad features like max
32MB per one drive, some usefull memory management programs can't run under it
etc. And also I have a Qbasic with exe compilator so I am trying
something;-))



Radek