[pmwiki-users] Documentation feedback + install question

christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Sat Apr 1 03:39:49 CST 2006


On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, John Hupp wrote:

Hi John, did this really go to the correct list?

cheers
/Christian


> Hello, all.  This is my first attempt with the successor to the FAQ
> system.  Kindly indulge me.
> 
> I just downloaded 0.9 SR2 and am trying this out on an old 486 computer that does not support a bootable CD. I was trying to use the prescribed installation boot disk created with fdos1440.img and WinImage.
> 
> As my first choice, I wanted to use Smart Boot Manager: The readme at http://fdos.org/ripcord/beta9sr2/readme.txt documents boot menus for the installation boot disk, and it describes a choice for a Smart Boot Manager which supports booting from CD even for many systems that do not natively support that.  But I found that Smart Boot Manager was not offered in the menus on the current installation boot disk.
> 
> As my second choice, I wanted to boot to the installation boot disk, selecting the most capable configuration my hardware supported (HIMEM + ... + CD-ROM), then run the installation/setup program from the CD-ROM.  But the Readme (above) does not say what EXE to run on the CD.  It merely says:
>     Step3:
> Once the active primary partition actually contains a filesystem, be it already present or just created through the FORMAT program, it will allow you to install FreeDOS using the installation program.  The installation program is intuitive to use ...
> 
> Poking around some on the CD, I thought that \freedos\setup\batch\AUTORUN.BAT might be the right file to run.  Later I settled on H:\freedos\setup\install\INSTALL.EXE, but without complete conviction.  An explicit statement in the Readme would be helpful.
> 
> Then there was the choice of installation mode: GUI or Text and the flavors of each.  I initially chose GUI 4-bit color.  But that generated error messages and terminated the installation.  Errors:
> An unhandled exception occurred at 0x00048B72
> Access violation
>  0x00048b72
>  0xFF080000
> An unhandled exception occurred at 0x0005B36A
> Access violation
>  0x0005B36A
> 
> So I made another attempt with Text mode installation.  The problem I ran into here was setting the Install-From location (where are the source files?).  After failing with several path entries, I finally seemed to succeed with <drive>:\freedos\packages\binbase.  Again, an explicit statement in the Readme would be helpful.
> 
> But then I found that the installation had not installed the kernel, so it seems that I still got something wrong.  Here is my only clue: When I tried to fix this and install the kernel by running SYS from FDOS\BIN and using FDOS\BIN as the source, I discovered that COMMAND.COM was not found there.  Nor was it already in the root directory.
> 
> Comments?  Anyone see my mistake(s)?

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr






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