Re: Installing ms-dos from floppies

[Jan Willem Stumpel <jstumpel@planet.nl>]

Bart Oldeman wrote:

> FD FORMAT simply fails on the "network" (ie. lredir) drive C:.
> It can't be formatted. I suspect that the Setup program does
> not like to install on network drives, so your only way out is
> to use an HDIMAGE via mkfatimage16 (see the man page) and
> specify that in $_hdimage.
> 
> FORMAT works on HDIMAGES -- because the low level stuff is
> skipped but also unnecessary unlike floppies: it just puts on
> the boot sector and FAT on the image. But mkfatimage16 already
> creates the FAT anyway.

Thanks for this tip about mkfatimage16, but even using this I did
not succeed. I tried it as follows:

- in ~/.dosemu/drives deleted c
- in ~/.dosemurc put $_hdimage = "/home/jws/dostemp"
- called (from /home/jws) mkfatimage16 -k 60000 -f dostemp
- called xdosemu -A with the first ms-dos 6.22 floppy in the drive

Is this correct? I can't think of anything else, but anyway the
setup program did not like it. It said:

 Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 Setup
 ---------------------------
          Formatting Hard Disk Drive

          Please wait; Setup is formatting your hard disk drive.

                 Error

          Setup cannot install MS-DOS 6.22 on your
          computer.

          An error was detected while formatting
          your primary hard disk partition.

          . Press ENTER to exit Setup.

The strange thing is that if you choose to "exit" and then call
"format c:" from a:, it works without complaints (but of course
this does not, by itself, install ms-dos).

Apparently the setup program does not recognise that the C: drive
is already "formatted", and you cannot make it skip this
"formatting" step.

Regards, Jan