Re: Off topic: enhanced DOS

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Patricia M Godfrey wrote:

> Jordan wrote, "your `plain vanilla' DOS disk for booting purposes was
> the W98 Emergency Recovery Diskette."
> Actually, it wasn't.
>
> I think that MSDOS9x (let's for
> clarity refer to the DOS underlying Windows thus: MSDOS 95a, 95b, 95c,
> 98a, 98b; if we're talking about any non MS DOS, let's specify. OK?) is
> enough Windows to see and handle FAT32. After all, that's what one uses
> to partition and format the disk before installing Win.

Well, I was thinking in terms of the discrete, sold separately packages of just
DOS, like the PC-DOS 2000 I have. I'm not sufficiently familiar with W98, or how
you separate out the file list you quoted from that boot diskette.

>     It occurs to me that you're running other opsyses, so you must have a
> boot manager of some sort. THAT of itself, regardless of the size of the
> drive, can prevent a boot from MS DOS from reading the drive.

Quite so, and I said upfront that my complex partition-map, multi-OS setup is not a
proper test-bed for investigating this. I do know that on mine I could see
anything FAT-16 that fell inside the 8G mark, even though there were some
intervening HPFS partitions, and couldn't see any FAT-16 stuff I tried to
establish beyond it. And actually, there is a way to check, despite the dual-C
drives situation. File Manager, in Win 3.1x, has a curious quirk or bug. It does
not respect the "invisibility" of the other C:, so long as the other one is a
partition type it knows how to read ! You can peer over the wall, as it were.

> But what do you mean by "real DOS"? MSDOS 9x is REAL
> DOS. It's the Windows sludge that's the add-on. Of course DOS 6.x cannot
> see FAT32, since it didn't exist then. But MSDOS 9x can, as far as I can
> see.

Maybe that wasn't the most precise nomenclature. "Standalone" DOS ?

> Novel is no go. Tried on two fat 32 PCs (one had a SCSI drive, so I
> thought that might be the problem). Dir C: yields "Invalid drive."

That *should be* fixable, with the addition of an appropriate SCSI driver, except
that on more contemporary SCSI (like what I'm using), I've found the drivers have
grown large enough that everything you need may not fit on the boot diskette
anymore. (That's what has killed off the usability of the BOOTOS2 emergency
diskettes.) It should be testable on hard drive, though.

Also, I don't think we can rule out the possibility that the FAT-32-understanding
capability you saw in your boot disk was written into that Win-9x version of
Command.Com (& / or the two System Files), instead of via a separate IFS driver,
like the ones I alluded to.

> There is--or was--evidently something called Caldera DOS; my hard drive
> utils from Western Digital use it to boot. But Caldera was bought out by
> SCO, who is now trying to make anyone running any flavor of *nix (Linux
> included and the FSF must be screaming) pay it royalties.
> Patricia

I probably have this somewhere. It might have been included with Norton's GHOST,
or something like that. As long as it's sufficiently up to date that it still
works, SCO can't stop me from trying it.

Jordan