Trying to boot MS-DOS

[Insanitor]

I installed Bookwormpup64 10.0.4 and I cannot boot MS-DOS and all of the other operating systems with any boot loader I have tried. ANY.

I want:

To boot MS-DOS

To boot Windows 2000

To boot Bookwormpup64 10.0.4

And to have the choice to do so when my computer starts and to do so without error messages.

This shouldn't be too much to ask. But apparently it IS.
And while I was told that grub4dos detects all operating systems installed on the computer, IT DOES NOT...
Although one time I managed to do it once, it booted MS-DOS and it gave me an error.

There's nothing like thinking you've going to run through the finish line because you're 1 millimeter close to it only to discover that there is now someone faster than you taking that finish line and carrying it far away from you making sure you'll never get yourself through it...

And I've spent 3 days here pulling my hair trying to figure this out.

Now I have no hair left to pull out so I have no choice but to ask for help.

What's the problem?

Take your pick. Point to any possible error you can think of and that's my problem.

What have I done so far? I failed.

Command line, ls, 0,0 or any statistical combination or whatever.

[Flash]

Is this the same problem as you started here? viewtopic.php?t=10380

[rockedge]

Booting MS-DOS is similar to booting Windows. MS-DOS will need to go on a FAT16 or something like that partition that is dedicated for MS-DOS.

Look around at this example, it might help. I just run DOSBox or DOSBox-x, which are both excellent choices these days for ease of getting into a DOS system without the hassles -> viewtopic.php?p=109583#p109583

[BologneChe]

Booting MS-DOS is similar to booting Windows. MS-DOS will need to go on a FAT16 or something like that partition that is dedicated for MS-DOS.

Look around at this example, it might help. I just run DOSBox or DOSBox-x, which are both excellent choices these days for ease of getting into a DOS system without the hassles -> viewtopic.php?p=109583#p109583

Another alternative to DOSBox: 86Box. We can install old versions of Windows and emulate architectures, graphics cards and sound cards.

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases/tag/v4.0.1

[Insanitor]

Is this the same problem as you started here? viewtopic.php?t=10380

Yes,

I have managed to fix the booting into Windows 2000 problem but booting into MS-DOS is still beyond my grasp.

And I absolutely LOATHE emulation.

If I want to have sex, would I choose to do it via emulation?

I bought a Pentium 4 motherboard with ISA slots so I can boot into REAL MS-DOS so I can run REAL MS-DOS games and applications.

At present, not even in the boot menu is there is an option to boot it. Why?

Because it did not auto detect anything, there is no entry for it in the menu lst file. If I add one it won't work so that's why I'm asking for help here.

Of course I can add the recommended one as stated in the documentation.

But of course this results in an error.

The errors when attempting to take them in as a whole seem to suggest that this boot loader is unable to detect the hard drive. Yet when I boot it with my trusty BIOS, it works fine.

If I choose to boot a CD with it's own boot loader it will boot MS-DOS just fine but not anything else and definitely not puppy linux. It's as if it seeks to frustrate me.

[BologneChe]

Is this the same problem as you started here? viewtopic.php?t=10380

Yes,

I have managed to fix the booting into Windows 2000 problem but booting into MS-DOS is still beyond my grasp.

And I absolutely LOATHE emulation.

If I want to have sex, would I choose to do it via emulation?

Emulation was only a proposition. No need for a nosebleed. And have fun with your junk.

[Wiz57]

Question...how is your boot drive formatted? IIRC Win2K uses NTFS, MS DOS uses FAT12/16 (depending on drive media...floppy vs hard drive)...
Pups can be frugally "installed" to either, but since the mid 2000s, NTFS has been more common, unless multibooting other Linux distros.
If you have Win2000 booting, open FileManager and see if you have an MS DOS partition. What is it if it is there? You may even have to use
Windows disk tools to repartition your drive, and give MS DOS a partition to install to...remember, MS DOS to be bootable MUST BE IN THE
FIRST PARTITION, formatted as stated above, probably in your case 16 bit, then use FDISK from DOS to fix the MBR (master boot record)
of the DOS partition. It may be necessary to setup changing boot disks in BIOS to choose OS to boot, not sure on that as last time I had
anything similar was an old Pentium 166 w/MMX with 2 HDDs, one for MS DOS 6.22 & Win3.1, the other for Win95...back then I dabbled
with Linux on a 3.5 in diskette, "BasicLinux" was the name...to choose DOS/Win3 I entered BIOS at powerup and chose the disk with those
installed, or if desired, the disk with Win95, as first boot device.
Wiz

[Insanitor]

Is this the same problem as you started here? viewtopic.php?t=10380

Yes,

I have managed to fix the booting into Windows 2000 problem but booting into MS-DOS is still beyond my grasp.

And I absolutely LOATHE emulation.

If I want to have sex, would I choose to do it via emulation?

Emulation was only a proposition. No need for a nosebleed. And have fun with your junk.

If I work at an auto repair shop and someone asks me to fix their Volkswagen, I try to help. I don’t say, “go buy a Volvo”.

I certainly didn’t need your, “help”.

Question...how is your boot drive formatted? IIRC Win2K uses NTFS, MS DOS uses FAT12/16 (depending on drive media...floppy vs hard drive)...
Pups can be frugally "installed" to either, but since the mid 2000s, NTFS has been more common, unless multibooting other Linux distros.
If you have Win2000 booting, open FileManager and see if you have an MS DOS partition. What is it if it is there? You may even have to use
Windows disk tools to repartition your drive, and give MS DOS a partition to install to...remember, MS DOS to be bootable MUST BE IN THE
FIRST PARTITION, formatted as stated above, probably in your case 16 bit, then use FDISK from DOS to fix the MBR (master boot record)
of the DOS partition. It may be necessary to setup changing boot disks in BIOS to choose OS to boot, not sure on that as last time I had
anything similar was an old Pentium 166 w/MMX with 2 HDDs, one for MS DOS 6.22 & Win3.1, the other for Win95...back then I dabbled
with Linux on a 3.5 in diskette, "BasicLinux" was the name...to choose DOS/Win3 I entered BIOS at powerup and chose the disk with those
installed, or if desired, the disk with Win95, as first boot device.
Wiz

I formatted the partition that MS-DOS wants. A FAT partition.

It is located on that device fine and it boots fine using my bios. It just won’t boot with grub4dos.

MS-DOS is installed on it’s own separate hard drive and since it boots when I change the hard drive boot priority in the bios, nothing at all is wrong with it. If there were, that would be the first thing I would address.

The problem is that if I choose to boot a different hard drive using the bios and then use a boot loader, it will put all others out of whack and there will certainly be some other operating system that won’t boot.

[BologneChe]

@Insanitor

No problem. You can install DOOM on your dryer if you like.

[rockedge]

I try to help. I don’t say, “go buy a Volvo”.

You don't like my suggestion of using DOSBox? You acting like an elitist is telling.

With Grub4Dos I can boot MS-DOS on bare metal or a QEMU virtual machine or a VirtualBox VM. Then have the option of 2 different DOSBox's which do pretty much the same thing without all the hassles.

Apparently you can't.

I already showed you how to do it with Grub4Dos. Figure it out.

[Wiz57]

IIRC, MS DOS will not boot with any other bootloader such as grub4dos, grub2, etc. So, since you can choose your DOS drive
in BIOS, I would leave that drive as is. So, that brings us to the Win2000 drive, as well as the Puppy drive...I would use
this drive as the multiboot drive. Somewhere in the forum you can find a link to a program called Lick, this will install
grub4dos and your Puppy, as well as set the bootloader to allow multibooting usually by chainloading the Windows boot
loader.

[rockedge]

usually by chain loading the Windows boot loader.

This is how to do it. I think Windows 3.1 boot loader can be chain loaded as well.

Why not just run the entire machine as MS-DOS? Perhaps set it up first for DOS then see if you can coax dual booting with a Linux distro like Puppy Linux..

There is a guy somewhere on GitHub that writes really complex Grub4Dos scripts and boot stanza's that I believe can address booting Windows of all types, perhaps there is something for MS-DOS since early Windows is basically a graphical layer on top of MS-DOS

[Null_ID]

Dual hard drive setup. MS-DOS gets a dedicated hard drive, and you install it there, where it can have its own boot loader and sector and file system, guaranteed to work. This becomes the master drive that boots 1st. Then you download Grub4Dos from where ever. Under pure, real mode DOS, while you're at the root of drive C:\, issue MKDIR GRUB, so that you get C:\GRUB, and copy the MS-DOS specific version of Grub4Dos, GRUB.EXE to C:\GRUB, so that you get C:\GRUB\GRUB.EXE. From C:\ you will then CD to the GRUB-folder, where you will issue GRUB.EXE to boot Grub4Dos under real mode DOS. To C:\GRUB, you must also create MENU.LST which will contain all the boot entries for Win2K and the Linux of your choice. Good old EDIT.COM will be your friend here.

Your 2nd hard drive, installed as a slave unit, will contain your Win2K and your Linux of choice. Win2K will be installed next, before Linux, because Win2K will be wanting an NTFS partition. The GRUB.EXE on your MS-DOS master drive will be used to boot both. I'll leave it up to you to figure out how it's done.

[Insanitor]

I try to help. I don’t say, “go buy a Volvo”.

You don't like my suggestion of using DOSBox? You acting like an elitist is telling.

With Grub4Dos I can boot MS-DOS on bare metal or a QEMU virtual machine or a VirtualBox VM. Then have the option of 2 different DOSBox's which do pretty much the same thing without all the hassles.

Apparently you can't.

I already showed you how to do it with Grub4Dos. Figure it out.

It seems that getting what you want around here is certainly not achieved by asking for it.

If I could figure it out I would have after 3 days of trying.

Since nobody can find an answer including me, I must conclude there is none.

It should be renamed to grub4notdos.

And no, I never approve suggestions that do not comply to a given problem.

From the dosbox faq:

“While we are hoping that one day, DOSBox will run all programs ever made for the PC, we are not there yet. At present, DOSBox running on a high-end machine will roughly be the equivalent of a 486 PC. The 0.60 release has added support for "protected mode" allowing for more complex and recent programs, but note that this support is still in an early stage of development and unlike the support for 386 real-mode games (or earlier) hasn't been completed yet. Also note that "protected mode" games need substantially more resources and may require a much faster processor for you to run them properly in DOSBox.”

I never told anyone, “if dosbox doesn’t work, run MS-DOS.”

But you’re welcome to try it. Let’s see how many people will like it. My point is just as valid. Figure it out.

[Insanitor]

Dual hard drive setup. MS-DOS gets a dedicated hard drive, and you install it there, where it can have its own boot loader and sector and file system, guaranteed to work. This becomes the master drive that boots 1st. Then you download Grub4Dos from where ever. Under pure, real mode DOS, while you're at the root of drive C:\, issue MKDIR GRUB, so that you get C:\GRUB, and copy the MS-DOS specific version of Grub4Dos, GRUB.EXE to C:\GRUB, so that you get C:\GRUB\GRUB.EXE. From C:\ you will then CD to the GRUB-folder, where you will issue GRUB.EXE to boot Grub4Dos under real mode DOS. To C:\GRUB, you must also create MENU.LST which will contain all the boot entries for Win2K and the Linux of your choice. Good old EDIT.COM will be your friend here.

Your 2nd hard drive, installed as a slave unit, will contain your Win2K and your Linux of choice. Win2K will be installed next, before Linux, because Win2K will be wanting an NTFS partition. The GRUB.EXE on your MS-DOS master drive will be used to boot both. I'll leave it up to you to figure out how it's done.

Are you sure this doesn’t mess with A20? Just asking.

[rockedge]

Are you sure this doesn’t mess with A20? Just asking.

Don't think so. Should be able to select the primary and secondary HDD order in the BIOS pretty safely.

[Insanitor]

Are you sure this doesn’t mess with A20? Just asking.

Don't think so. Should be able to select the primary and secondary HDD order in the BIOS pretty safely.

Grub4dos appears to be a very complex program.

I’ll try Null_ID’s tutorial. I have copied it.

[Insanitor]

Are you sure this doesn’t mess with A20? Just asking.

Don't think so. Should be able to select the primary and secondary HDD order in the BIOS pretty safely.

Grub4dos appears to be a very complex program.

I’ll try Null_ID’s tutorial. I have copied it.

Bigpup said this in another post:

“When you are mixing it up with a bunch of different OS's installed.
Getting boot loader entries for Puppy Linux, usually does turn into you manually making entries, to boot them.
None of the other OS's boot loader installers know how to make an entry to boot Puppy or even see the Puppy version installed.

Frugalpup Installer is good for doing installs, but it's boot loader installer is not setup to go look for any other OS's except Puppy Linux and only makes entries for them.
Very good if only Puppy Linux versions are installed on the drive.”

I really wish I had seen this info 3 days ago.

[Jasper]

@Insanitor

Have you looked at Plop Boot Manager?

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

[mikeslr]

Insanitor, "Frugalpup Installer is good for doing installs, but it's boot loader installer is not setup to go look for any other OS's except Puppy Linux and only makes entries for them."

Grub2Config, https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=3360 will search all connected drives (including USB-Keys, and external hard-drives) and create menu entries for Windows and most Linuxes (via chainloading) and all Puppys. But I don't know if it will create a menu entry for MS-DOS (via chain-loading or otherwise). Worth a try anyway.

I know this is not what you want and I have no experience with MS-DOS. But ultimately the objective is to run applications/programs. So for what it's worth, I have extensive experience using Wine even when in order to run Windows programs I had to SFS-load a 32-bit compatibility SFS into a 64-Bit OS in order to use 32-bit Wine. Testing revealed that there was no appreciable delay in starting Windows programs and RAM consumption running a Program under Wine (despite even the need to employ a 32-bit Compatibility SFS almost the size of Puppy) was not significantly more than running a comparable 64-bit native application. Wine, however, insists that it it NOT an emulator. Perhaps a more accurate analogy would be the use of VMWare.

[Clarity]

Hi @Insanitor

I offer a solution: SuperGrub2 Disk (SG2D). It will find your installed OSes and boot them.

[Insanitor]

Hi @Insanitor

I offer a solution: SuperGrub2 Disk (SG2D). It will find your installed OSes and boot them.

I tried it.

It didn’t. MS-DOS boots but nothing else. It says it cannot detect any lst or cfg files in any partition. This means that it doesn’t boot Puppy Linux.

@Insanitor

Have you looked at Plop Boot Manager?

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

I did.

It does not boot Puppy Linux. Also, I added it to the boot menu of Windows 2000. While it boots MS-DOS, it cannot do it without an a20 error. The only way to combat this is to boot it with the CD but it still can’t boot Puppy Linux.

Wine, however, insists that it it NOT an emulator. Perhaps a more accurate analogy would be the use of VMWare.

I do use Wine. In some cases I prefer it due to it’s interesting capability. The fact that it can run Windows programs in Linux is amazing but I tend to pay attention to my enthusiasm to tone it down a bit because sometimes, it takes more than Wine itself to get a program running.

[rockedge]

It does not boot Puppy Linux

Wow I never experienced that before. All of the Puppy Linux's I needed PLOP for booted.

I had 2 machines that were old enough that they couldn't boot from USB via the BIOS. They needed PLOP to in effect be the boot loader to be able to boot Puppy's from a USB stick. But that was a while ago. Puppy Linux being one of the easy systems to boot I am surprised that the latest versions of PLOP are unable to start F96-CE_4 for example.

[Insanitor]

It does not boot Puppy Linux

Wow I never experienced that before. All of the Puppy Linux's I needed PLOP for booted.

I had 2 machines that were old enough that they couldn't boot from USB via the BIOS. They needed PLOP to in effect be the boot loader to be able to boot Puppy's from a USB stick. But that was a while ago. Puppy Linux being one of the easy systems to boot I am surprised that the latest versions of PLOP are unable to start F96-CE_4 for example.

Now you’ve got an idea of what I’ve been going through. I’m starting to think that the problem might be some BIOS setting of some sort. However, I wouldn’t have any idea what that might be.