Originally Posted by
nkedel
Just put FreeDOS on a USB stick (you can probably also put old-school MSDOS on a USB stick, but why would you want to.)
Tried that, for some reason it wouldn't work. "bad boot.ini" message, etc., that DOS doesn't use. I think it comes from the bios, but that would seem to mean that the bios expects you to be loading Windows always.
Anyhow, I have some stuff on DOS that I still use, and if I want to screw around directly with the hard drive, I have to do it outside of XP/Win7.
Originally Posted by
nkedel
If just using XP and Win7, I would recommend the former. As long as you install XP first, Windows 7 should just see the old installation there and set it up automatically.
This is what I was
hoping would happen. On an existing setup, when I boot into XP, it also know that my FAT16 version of DOS is on the drive and offers to boot it. Not sure why it doesn't see my FAT32 DOS, but in any event all are available from SC.
Not sure what happens if I try to install linux on the same drive, but there's stories out there purporting to tell how to do it. A third-party manager should be able to handle all this stuff.
For the record, I don't know what UEF1 is, and at the moment I have no interest in virtualizing anything. Ordinarily, I don't
have to do it and it's one of those things that may be just wonderful but since I can get along without it just fine I'm probably not going to bother.
Of course, this opens me up to the criticism that "You don't know enough for me to tell you what to do" like I used to get from the Linux weenies when I'd things like, "Where are the usual places the docs say the files go?", or "Why don't the
man pages tell me what the switches do?".
