PC DOS 7.10 installation

Torinde commented 2 years ago

Question

It seems the procedure is:

get drive image that boots some DOS (I tried with PC DOS 2000), make a copy of that
get floppy image (non-bootable) with the PC DOS 7.10 files
boot the DOS guest with the floppy mounted
use MAKEBOOT.BAT (or FORMAT32 C: /Q manually)
boot from the newly emptied image and copy into it the PC DOS 2000 files from another mounted image

But I get an error. From inside PCDOS2000:

From DOSbox-X:

Format32 c: /q/b Format32 c: /b Format32 c: Same result, only difference is that if /q is missing, then it says “The /Q switch is required at this time.”

Deleting the partition with fdisk (from DOSbox-X/FreeDOS or from inside PCDOS2000) results in the image being unmountable "Cannot create drive from file." (I was hoping to use PCDOS7.1's fdsik32 to create partition before formatting).

How can I make a really empty image, e.g. without partitions/MBR/anything? How can I resolve the PC DOS 7.1 FORMAT32 problem - or to install it in another way?

Another thing - it seems PC DOS 2000, doesn't support "/TESTMEM:OFF", but the Guide suggest to use it.

PS. Files I found to be different - list may be good to add to the Guide (whenever the full installation procedure is sorted out): @rderooy Extra files in PC DOS 7.1 31r1035.zip\sgdeploy\sgtk\DOS vs IBM PC-DOS 2000.7z vs IBM PC-DOS 7.0 [English-UK] (CD) [Upgrade].7z

FIlename/bytes 7.1 2000 7.00 7.1 date COMMAND.COM 53802 52965 52956 3.12.2003 DEBUG.COM 24945 15302 15302 3.12.2003 DYNALOAD.COM 1792 1376 1376 3.12.2003 HIMEM.SYS 14592 14160 14160 3.12.2003 IBMBIO.COM 44656 40726 40614 3.12.2003 IBMDOS.COM 42566 37066 37066 3.12.2003

BLDLEVEL.COM 20261 none none 3.12.2003 FDISK32.COM 21418 none none 3.12.2003 FORMAT32.COM 20352 none none 3.12.2003 IBMCDET.SYS 2247 none none 29.4.2004 IBMIDECD.SYS 16123 none none 30.9.2003 IPSRASPI.SYS 47602 none none 30.9.2004 MAKEBOOT.BAT 1582 none none 21.11.2003 NOINT25.COM 1124 none none 3.12.2003

ATTRIB.EXE 8664 8664 8664 30.9.2003 "if not exist..." in MAKEBOOT.BAT

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maron2000 commented 2 years ago

I don't see any flaws. I tried PC-DOS2000 (7.0 rev1). Is this peculiar to ver 7.1?

Simply mounted a fresh blank 250MB image and floppy of PC-DOS2000.

command_000

guest os_001

And of course I can boot the formatted image. guest os_002

maron2000 commented 2 years ago

I was able to try ver 7.1 as well. There are some variants of 7.10 and there seems that there is a bug in FDISK32 in some of them. You can find some similar reports in other emulators as well. https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=80522

You can either search for other variants or use FDISK of Windows 9x. If you properly partition your disk using FAT32, FORMAT32 works well.

guest os_001

rderooy commented 2 years ago

I think version 7.1 was never available as a stand-alone DOS version from IBM. It was an OEM version for things like firmware updates. As such I did not test it.

maron2000 commented 2 years ago

@rderooy Yes, you're right. According to this Japanese BBS site, there was a guy who made an inquiry to IBM, and the answer was that 7.1 was not sold as an independent product, and has only limited features compared to 7.0 and 2000. Some known products which 7.1 was bundled with are Norton Ghost 2003 and Recovery disk of some Thinkpads.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BIpwZYltlAkJ:www.thinkpad-club.net/modules/d3forum/index.php%3Ftopic_id%3D3925+&cd=4&hl=ja&ct=clnk&gl=jp&client=firefox-b-e

Torinde commented 2 years ago

Thank you both, I'll do test with FAT32. Could it also be a problem that I have ver=710 in my config (e.g. DOSbox-X emulates MS-DOS 7.10)? Also, my mount/imgmount are pointing to network share (where I have space for images, etc.), but with an underline as first character and space in the name.

And yes, PC DOS 7.1 is only a bunch of files - I got mine from 31r1035.zip from IBM public FTP - will try to post a link later.

rderooy commented 2 years ago

The ver=710 setting has no effect once you do a boot of a guest os.

Torinde commented 2 years ago

Links to PC DOS 7.1

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-serverguide-scripting-toolkit-version-1101-ibm-eserver-bladecenter-hs20-type-8678-xseries-360-xseries-460
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/systems/support/system_x/31r1035.zip
then inside: sgdeploy\sgtk\DOS

Does anybody have a link to the Norton Ghost bootable disk (with PC DOS 7.1, Fireware, USB and LAN DOS drivers)?

Torinde commented 2 years ago

My goal is to get to a FAT16 HDD that boots PC DOS 7.10 and has all the PC DOS 2000 utilities (e.g. to utilize it as DOS/Win3.x environment, but also occasionally to attach FAT32 images together with it and to make bootable floppies that can operate on FAT32 images as well)

I managed to install it: booting from MS-DOS 7.10 floppy while a FAT32 partition image is loaded as HDD and the PC DOS 7.10 non-bootable floppy is B: Substituting A: with B: in MAKEBOOT.BAT (you can do that before booting with DOSbox-X edit) This got me to an empty HDD that boots PC DOS 7.10.

My next attempt was to make a bootable floppy with PC DOS 7.10, but that was unsuccessful: As you can also see in my top message - SYS.COM of PC DOS 7.10 is the same as SYS.COM of PC DOS 2000 (thus I didn't list it in the file differences). And it's incompatible... Others have similar struggles.

FORMAT32 from PC DOS 7.10 doesn't support floppies:

So, instead: boot the empty PC DOS 7.10 HDD, use FORMAT.COM a: /s from PC DOS 2000 to make a PC DOS 7.1 bootable floppy. That works!

Then I tried using FORMAT.COM /s (PC DOS 2000 file from a bootable PC DOS 7.1 floppy) on a FAT16 504MB image from imgmake. Not possible: Fiddling with FDISK didn't help either (but maybe there is some specific combo of imgmake and fdisk settings that will make it work...?)

Then I used FORMAT.COM /b from inside PC DOS 2000 on a FAT16 504MB (maybe sometimes it had to be mounted with imgmount 2, sometimes with imgmount c: ). Then I booted from a PC DOS 7.1 floppy with that HDD image mounted. Manually performed the MAKEBOOT.BAT procedure (PC DOS 2000 attrib -h -s a:\ibm.com; attrib -h -r -s c:\ibm.com; xcopy ibmbio.com c:\, ibmdos.com c:\, command.com c:\; attrib +r +h +s c:\ibm.com; attrib +h +s a:\ibm.com) Even the initial "F1 ... Dos" is good - at some point in my attempts I had here "F1 ... ??" - minor question: why "Dos" and not "DOS"?

Tried to solve SYS not working via SETVER, but got:

In PC DOS 2000 (with the same CONFIG.SYS) there is no "NOTE : ...." maybe SETVER itself is not compatible with 7.10... is there another way to make SYS.COM run? Unclear if other DOS files will turn out incompatible as well...

In general - it can be considered resolved - to the degree possible with the 7.1 files I have.

Finally, some remaining questions:

is there an actual PC DOS 7.10 SYS.COM in one of the various PC DOS 7.10 packages?
How can I make a really empty image, e.g. without partitions/MBR/anything? - That I found in the wiki: IMGMAKE hdd.img -t hd_520 -nofs
it seems PC DOS 2000, doesn't support "/TESTMEM:OFF", but the Guide suggest to use it.

rderooy commented 2 years ago

I have updated the draft guide, such that it mentions that /TESTMEM:OFF is for MS-DOS. If you know a similar setting for PC DOS, let me know. This should appear in the next wiki release for the next dosbox-x release.

Below is the new text. I'm not sure if FreeDOS has a similar option.

If HIMEM is being loaded on startup, you may get a message "HIMEM is testing extended memory…", which can take a considerable amount of time and is pointless in an emulated environment. For MS-DOS, you can bypass it by editing CONFIG.SYS and changing DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS to DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF.

aazard commented 3 months ago

Hello all, sorry to necro... I have built the IBM PC DOS 7.1 to "final" version, as outlined by os/2 fan on winworld: https://archive.org/details/pcdos-71_202408

joncampbell123 / dosbox-x