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Re: booting DOS



Myron Gochnauer wrote:

> I would be interested in learning how you boot DOS that
> is not near the beginning of the disk (or within the first
> so-many sectors or something). I thought that was a
> limitation even for things like Win2K.  It might be nice
> to have a small real-DOS partition somewhere on my hard
> disk.

There is a possibility of getting dos to boot from a
partition which starts beyond 2Gb (the limit to its usual
capacity) but I haven't tested it exhaustively.
I do it on a 10Gb disk where the 2Gb dos partition
starts about 5Gb in from the origin.

All one does is create & format the partition then run a
program which patches it (I'm not sure where the patch
takes - on the boot or partition sector I imagine).

That sounds easy but of course fdisk makes it difficult if
not impossible (it won't normally allow 2 primary
partitions on the same disk IIRC). It 's easier to
have a civilised partition manager. I use a Russian affair
from Paragon.

I get most of my info on the subject from a freeware
partition manager called Ranish Partition Manager available
at http://www.ranish.com/part/

The latest version is 2.43 I believe. In its readme, it
says, picturesquely:

"Beta v2.43 fixes a bug that prevented some OSes (FreeBSD
to name one) from booting when /boot partitions was located
above 8G. The fix will let you boot Linux or FreeBSD from
partitions above 8G, however it will not make magic and
boot DOS from the end of 60G disk."

There is another program though which offers a similar
patch - Bootfix. I simply run it from floppy, with the
disk to modify being c:. It does all that's needed. I
attach a copy - I don't seem to have any doc on it though.
For me it seems to work better than Ranish.

If you want any help I'll be glad to try and supply it but
my information is sketchy and my memory worse. (Part of
the trouble being that docs are often ambiguous.)

Sorry about the delay in replying - there's been trouble
with my phone line and this mail server. Then a personal
reply got sent back as undeliverable. Finally a reply to
the list did as well. (Which leaves me wondering if there
isn't an anti-virus somewhere in the email chain which
detects the fact that the attachment can modify sensitive
portions of a PC disk .. )

John

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