[GEM Development] Liam Proven! DOS in VirtualPC

[Liam Proven]

On 9 December 2017 at 04:30, Thomas Clayton <topcatdrc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Am at work. Left home (where earlier letter was written) just after writing
> it.
>
> You had been inquiring on the other site (ArchiveOS) about what you should
> change /do. WE (you and I, at least), now, know that you had a BLANK disc -
> which is why nothing but two dots appeared! No further explanation needed.
> I'll try this soon myself and let you (all) know.
>
> REALLY sorry to hear that (about eCS / OS3). It won't put me off from
> trying!  :-)

I answered this in the messages from another list that I forwarded.

«
I've been playing around some more with my projects to create VMs /
bootable USB keys with PC DOS 7.1 and DR-DOS.

Right now I'm focusing on DR-DOS 7.1 and the DR OpenDOS Enhancement
Project, because that's FOSS and AFAICS it can be redistributed, which
I can't with DR-DOS 7.02/7.03/7.04/7.05 or DR-DOS 8/8.1, which were
commercially licensed.

I found a download of the last build released:

https://archiveos.org/drdos/

First, it's the wrong size. VirtualBox can't mount it. VMware can.

I truncated it to exactly 2880 sectors using the advice from ``jleg094'' here:

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=39141

VBox mounts that. But it won't boot, nor in VMware  -- it just
displays 2 dots and freezes.

Embarrassingly late in the troubleshooting process, I've found why.

I didn't think to check what was on the image! Foolish of me.

I mounted it on a pre-booted VM and looked, and it's blank! There's
nothing in the image at all.

So, I mounted the empty image file as a loop device, copied the boot
files in there and then the rest of the files in the distro archive.

And lo, it works! It boots my VM just fine, and it's now running 7.01-08.

All I need to do now is work out how to make the hard disk bootable,
and I'm in business.

The DR-DOS 7 SYS command won't do it, as the files aren't named
IBMBIOS.COM and IBMSYS.COM -- they're DRBIO.SYS and DRSYS.SYS.

I copied them to the expected names. SYS completes but the disk won't boot.

Next step will be to try with Norton Disk Doctor.

I'm still working on VMs, but I know have bootable diskette images of
both. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time either has
been made available.

DR-DOS 7.08 is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cz8nrdv7h4sgr6o/drdep7018.zip?dl=0

You'll need the rest of DR-DOS 7.01 to install a complete OS but
that's widely available.

A bootable PC DOS 7.1 diskette image is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zsujtvp0gs44qcx/PCDOS71.vfd?dl=0

This is a VirtualBox disk image, containing the PC-DOS 7.1 files from
the IBM ServerGuide Scripting Toolkit, as made available by IBM and
described here:

http://toogam.com/software/archive/opsys/dos/ibmpcdos/getpcd71.htm

If you get that first, AIUI that gives you a licence to a personal-use
copy. I have not modified these files in any way except to combine the
separately-downloadable files and the boot disk image, and to remove
any non-PC DOS files from the disk image.

Again, the rest of the OS must be taken from a copy of PC DOS 7.01.
That too is widely available.

Feedback welcomed.
»

So, current status:

* I have the following working types of disk image:
 -- 1.4MB floppy disk
 -- Running VirtualBox VM hard disk
... for both IBM PC DOS 7.1 and DR-DOS 7.01-6

* In addition, I have:
 -- USB key
 -- real physical hard disk partition
... for IBM PC DOS 7.1.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053