Re: "freedos" Command HowTo?

[Jake Thomas]

I appreciate the effort and care, Mr. Holm, but the link you gave didn't really 
have much to do with what I'm looking for. 

Firstly I just wanted to point out that the "freedos" command (an actual Grub2 
command) isn't documented in the Grub 1.99 manual. Most of the Grub2 commands 
are. Maybe someone will fill it in?

I am already familiar with chainloading, but booting the FreeDOS kernel 
directly from Grub would be much more preferable.

But a link on the site you linked to got me thinking about chainloading again:
http://hype-free.blogspot.com/2008/12/booting-freedos-with-grub.html?m=1

I am already familiar with chainloading and using memdisk to load FreeDOS, but 
in my experience I had to make an image (used dd) of my MBR from right after I 
installed FreeDOS, and then I installed Grub. Then I could chainload the image 
of my MBR I made, which booted DOS. So FreeDOS put its bootloader in the MBR, 
contrary to the above link. Getting the FreeDOS bootloader to stay in the VBR 
would be cool. (or maybe I'm just deceived and all chainloading the MBR image 
did was further chainload FreeDOS's VBR bootloader. But I thought I tried 
chainloading the partition directly and even tried marking it as active. Maybe 
the VBR bootloader isn't happy unless it sees something in the MBR which 
chainloading the image does for it?)

Now I'm wondering about MBR-schemed partitions again. "MBR-schemed parititions" 
as in the partition behaves as an entire hard drive, complete with an MBR and 
possibly more than one partition. You can think of them as GPT's version of an 
extended partition in that there is one or more partitions in _a_ partition. 
Even if I didn't make a drivemapping for the partition as if it were its own 
hard drive, maybe simply chainloading will "magically" make it work (given my 
past experience of chainloading an MBR image, which included a partition table).

Also, I just found out about burg4dos, which, according to what I just read: 
http://reboot.pro/15313/ (see 4th post), I just might be able to use it to 
assign a gpt partition its own whole-disk drivemapping. So then I could boot 
into Grub, chainload burg4dos, give the MBR-schemed partition (which is on a 
GPT disk) its own whole-disk drivemapping, then chainload it, booting FreeDOS 
inside, which will treat the partition as if it is a whole hard drive.

And of course, there's always memdisk.

Jake

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 8, 2012, at 1:52 PM, Peter Holm <address@hidden> wrote:

> Maybe this can help
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CAF4AJDxHK5Awjw85KOcJygRTPYb2SM1UjLConTF7_mrjR289eg%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=freedos-user
> 
> 2012/6/4, Jake Thomas <address@hidden>:
>> Hello again,
>> 
>>     One think I've been meaning to ask is how to use the freedos command.
>> The Grub manual doesn't document it.
>> 
>>     You'd think it'd be as simple as "freedos [path to freedos kernel]". I
>> remember trying to boot the FreeDOS kernel with Grub in the past and not
>> succeding. Wikipedia's FreeDOS article says that you can boot the FreeDOS
>> kernel by "chainloader [path to FreeDOS kernel]" using Grub legacy. This did
>> not work for me in Grub2, not even with --force.
>> 
>>      I haven't tried recently, I'm mainly asking for the proper way to boot
>> FreeDOS with Grub if there is one.
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jake
>> 
>> 
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