Dear Janusz,

I've had a little time to look. I have 2 computers. one is an Acer laptop one year old. It would not boot freedos at all, initdisk had an opcode failure followed by a list of hex numbers which I do not understand. I tried with the grml cd and a freedos 1.0 live and installation cd.

The other is an old Pentium II. It looks to me that freedos boots from CD as a floppy emulation whereas grml boots in non-emulation mode. This means that when you say

If i will type dos At The GRML live CD boot prompt, free DOS is sucessfully loaded. But please, which keys should i press to activate A shell? Because when i wanted to type

a: or c:

Nothink has happened. Or is there only choice to install free DOS or only graphical shell is included?

then you should already have a prompt

A:>

Freedos already thinks it is on the A drive so that if you type a: then nothing changes! When you type c: you ought to get an error message saying no such drive or similar.

2. When booting freedos did you choose the option with himem.sys and emm386 and shcdux (the cd driver?) Unless you have a very old system it is probably wise.

3. Perhaps you might get help from

www.freedos.org

as freedos on grml is kind of an added extra and I don't know if many people use it.

4. If you boot the grml cd and go

grub - any key - down arrow once - enter

then it boots freedos with a few utils including the dos port of testdisk. It lands on this prompt

A:\TOOLS>

Now if you go testdisk /list (perhaps without the backslash) then it will list all the current partitions which it can see from dos. This may give you some info as to why you cannot see the fat32 partition.

5. Lastly unless I find my old XP installation disk to try what you are doing for myself then I'm getting stuck on how else to help. Still if you have more questions then please ask.

Best Wishes Moss

PS I think you right that a bios by default ought to look at a usb device to boot then a cd and thirdly a hard disk. I cannot imagine that finding a usb sound system should present too much difficulty. Perhaps you should try Apple first. Might sound odd but as their EFI boot is vastly superior to the BIOS (which will be replaced in the not too distant future, I reckon) then it would be an enhancement for Apple above the competition. That is there is something in it for them!