[Grml] question related to included Freedos in The GRML distro

[Maurice McCarthy]

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!