[svlug] Boot program

[Rafael Skodlar]

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting Rafael Skodlar (raffi at kset.com):
> 
> > http://www.calderathin.com/products/drdos/index.html  is IDEAL.
> 
> <cue tone of slight exaggerated patience>
> 
> In what particulars? 
> 
> When I am doing maintenance on / creation of FAT16 partitions, 
> I have simply found MS-DOS 6.22 to be the most reliable and 
> predictable tool.  (Remember, this discussion concerned rewriting
> of the 446-byte MBR program area.)  And I happen to own a copy.

Not everybody owns a copy of MS DOG, i.e. people entering the computer
world in the last few years don't necessarily have (a legal) copy of DOS.
New machines come with W9x and nobody (almost) knows there is DOG with
fdisk in there or how to use it.

> 
> Are you saying that Caldera DR DOS 7.02 has particular operational
> advantages in this area?  If so, what are they?
> 

Not in this MBR case. However, it does have an advantage in respect to
the issue on heated discussion we had on this list a few moons ago: 

"DR-DOS 7.02 is year 2000 compliant - The kernel will correct the system
date even if your BIOS does not support the Year 2000 " 

"added code to automatically correct the Year 2000 roll-over bug that is
present in most PC ROM BIOS chips."

Which proves my point that we don't need to throw away PCs just because
some BIOS won't handle the date correctly. Sometimes it takes months to
prove my point  :-)

> If you were simply making an ideological statement, then it would
> seem somewhat out of place in this particular discussion.

First jokes, now ideological statements. Nothing to do at the SVTP (SV Tea
Party). Can't talk about blue and reboot jokes, can't make ideological
statements...

Yes I wanted to make a statement. It was about an inexpensive alternative.
Here we all use the inexpensive alternative. If you need to get that OS
why not buy a better one?

Not having the corrupt DOS at hand one can download the demo version from
Caldera which would be good enough to handle the problem discussed above.

And there is FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org. I haven't tested it yet but
expect it to handle at least the MBR section of the disk. 

> 
> -- 
> Cheers,                Linux:  It is now safe to turn on your computer.
> Rick Moen
> rick (at) hugin.imat.com
> 

   Rafael
Aliens are real
http://www.artbell.com/aliens4.html



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