6 replies to this topic

[wendy]

I have been playing with a version of PC-DOS 7.1.32 (it's PC-DOS 7.1 from the sgtk 1.30.7).

It is modified DOS source, with a focus on setting up servers and blade machines. In any case, a cute trick is to add an extra 0-byte file to the diskette, in the shape of _BOOT_HD.NOZ . If ibmbio.com sees this, then it will offer to boot from the DVD/CD or from the hard disk, default to the hard disk.

It works on a regular floppy too, the DVD-CD thing will actually boot to the floppy, while the default is to the hard disk.

It has possibilities, and i imagine that jo.sys will do the same thing in Windows 98. The impact of this is that you can have a dos boot disk with the answer file etc on it, and start either dosmode or run mode without having to eject the diskette.

[Brito]

This tip will be mentioned on this week's newsletter.

Thank you Wendy.

[tikbalang]

from another thread:

IBM DOS has broken support for fat32 (but enough still to allow it to set up a computer), and no support for things like LFN. Symmantic has persisted with it for ghost restores, though (the first public appearence of this is in Ghost). Still, ghost is not "fiddling the fat", so to speak, and it is Ghost, not DOS that walks the hard disk [ghost can read NTFS partitions].

how bad is pcdos71 with fat32? can you cite instances where it fails? will it go away if i use 3rd party utils?

thanks.

[wendy]

From what i heard, it is not partial to partitions >2 G, although the msft fdisk will work with it (look at noint25,com, for example). It's more what i heard etc, rather than from experience. For production machines, i usually rely on modern operating systems to do the work.

It does not support long file names (which is not part of fat32).

[tikbalang]

thanks for the input. i was trying to create more space in my 1.44 bootfloppy. i went with lzdos.

[wendy]

You could use Tihiy's version of IO.SYS. This is MS-DOS 7.10 (update version), with no logo. It's about the size of LZDOS.

[tikbalang]

thanks, but it's too big (123kb versus 75kb of lzdos).