My first FreeDOS install (2004)

My experiences with FreeDOS began with the 0.9 beta on 1-12-2004. I set up an old Pentium 166 system to support some DOS based cross development tools. Initially I was going to use DOS 6.22, but a coworker suggested FreeDOS, so I gave it a try. I burned the roughly 10M image onto a CD on my linux system and booted it on the target (which has a new enough motherboard to support El Torito CD Rom booting.

The first headache after the nice install was figuring out how to get access to the CDROM again. First note that fdconfig.sys is used instead of config.sys if it exists. I don't know about fdauto.bat, but I don't have one on my system so I haven't found out yet.

Then, for my ATAPI cdrom drive I need to add (or activate) a line in each of [fd]config.sys and autoexec.bat as follows:

device=C:\fdos\bin\atapicdd.sys /d:FDCD0001 ( in CONFIG.SYS )

C:\fdos\bin\shsucdx /d:FDCD0001,r ( in AUTOEXEC.BAT )

After this, my cdrom drive shows up as R: and works just fine. (Actually the R: letter is determined by the last argument to the shsucdx invocation line in autoexec.bat). I ultimately decided I liked F: better. And by the way, if it isn't obvious already, the "fd" that shows up everywhere isn't file descriptor or floppy disk, it stands for Free Dos.

The next trick was to find a copy of unzip.exe somewhere. After some poking around, I found one on www.fdos.org, and this turned out to be version 5.32. Also available on the net is version 5.42. These could be put on a floppy and copied into c:\local which I added to my path.

Now we are cooking, with CDROM support and unzip, I can move all kinds of my old projects over onto this new machine.


Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org