Re: [Ensoniq-VFX-SD] Digest Number 387
2003-10-09 by Steve Wahl
On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 01:25:11PM -0000, Ensoniq-VFX-SD@yahoogroups.com wrote: > Message: 2 > Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 19:30:49 +0200 > From: hans-artmann@... > Subject: RE: Digest Number 386 > > [ I wrote about freeDOS ] > > Yes this might work, but: you must make sure that you have a FAT32 partition > on your harddisk to store the data. A NTFS partition cannot be accessed from > the floppy booted system. And the partition should not be compressed unsless > you are prepared to cope with rather complicated measures. > > Another idea is to install a plain DOS partition with enough space for the > data as a boot option. For this you could also use freeDOS I guess. Ahh, I should have been a bit more thorough in expressing my thoughts. Although I haven't tried it or even looked at the numbers, I would think a bootable freedos disk, on a 1.44 M floppy (with just command.com, nothing else non-essential), would have space for both the geibler utility and the 800k disk image. So you could do it all from the floppy. Am I too optimistic here? You could also put freedos on one floppy and the geibler utility and disk image on a second floppy. No need to reformat a hard disk for this. I just downloaded ede109.zip; EDE.EXE is 61632 bytes in the zip file. So I think there should be plenty of space on a 1.44M floppy. DOH! EDE is probably not able to read the source file from one floppy while trying to write it to another floppy! Grr... You could still do it with a ramdisk of some sort; any modern machine that doesn't have a FAT32 partition will have plenty of RAM. OK, here's how it can be done: I put together a version of freedos for anyone who needs it. http://www2.pro-ns.net/~steve/fdvfx.zip. It makes a floppy-bootable version of freedos that starts up with a ramdisk. After extracting the archive, make a floppy with it (install.bat does this for you), then copy EDE.EXE and whatever vfx disk image you want to use on the floppy. Boot from the floppy, pause and reflect how slow floppies feel in the modern day, and when you get the Z:\> prompt, run ede. (I pretty much successfully tested this process myself). Anybody providing disk images is welcome to make a copy of this for their own distribution. Heck, anybody NOT providing disk images is welcome as well... NOTE: I have virus checkers on my system, BUT would still be interested in having others check it for viruses to make sure I'm not committing a no-no here. And, by the way, I don't use DOS or Freedos or anything like that on a regular basis. I don't prefer or recommend freedos over any other options, except that I could create this and distribute it to the rest of you without any license problems. --> Steve