24 Jul
2021
24 Jul
'21
9:41 a.m.
On 7/23/21 6:43 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Well, maybe similarly to how you did with AIX, by the
total size divided
by number of images.? Although what I was referring to was people's
memories of the size of the box that they kept the install disks in :-)
Maybe someone who is more versed in the possible disk sizes and more
accurate (non-rounded) count. I'm extremely foggy when it comes to
5-1/4 inch disk capacities. 720 kB and 1.44 MB disks I can deal with.
But the minutia between 320 kB and 360 kB, combined with rounded
measurements, things get foggy for me.
The "Tools" CD-ROM was a third party
commercial product containing a
large collection of CD-ROM drivers.
Talk about a chicken and egg / priming problem. How do you get the
CD-ROM drivers off of the CD-ROM that you need a driver to access. ;-)
The quintessential answer is to have (access to) another system (or
driver) assist.
In August 1991, I attended a Microsoft Developer
conference in Seattle.
Bill Gates didn't show up, because he was in NYC on TV about the
birthday of 5150 (August 11, 1981).? They gave us copies of Windows 3.10
(which couldn't load on the 286 laptop that I had brought along, because
it didn't have A20 support, and gave those of us who asked that
international distribution Windows 3.0 CD-ROM.? Never saw it before or
since. It had Windows 3.0 installation with at least half a dozen
different languages.
Windows 3.x was relatively easy to streamline the installation by doing
-- what I think is called -- an "administrative" install such that it
copies all files off of the floppies into a single directory, presumably
on a network share, in a way that means that you can subsequently run
setup therefrom. I don't remember if simply copying all the files into
a single directory also sufficed.
Actually, you can, and easily.
MS-DOS 6 had an "INSTALL" program, which was demented.? It INSISTED on
installing on drive C:.? But, some of my machines had four floppies, and
I didn't want it to install on the 8" drive, or 3.25" drive, . . . Once
you install it on SOME/ANY OTHER machine, then, with that OTHER machine
booted up to DOS 6, just do a FORMAT A: /S of a boot floppy, and copy
files onto that, specifically including FORMAT.
Ya. I know that I can manually install MS-DOS by sysing boot media
(floppy or hard disk) and copying the contents of the DOS directory.
But that seems like more of a hack than should be necessary. Though it
can be made less annoying.
FORGET ABOUT THE "INSTALLATION" files.? with
extreme prejudice.
Boot your target machine with the DOS 6 boot floppy;? it has FORMAT.COM
on it (which IIRC was actually a .EXE file renamed .COM), and then use
that to FORMAT C: /S .
I feel like there /should/ be a way to streamline the MS-DOS 6.22
installation using methods from Microsoft. But, maybe I'm asking for
too much. Or more likely, I've simply not found it yet.
I do sort of like the installer from the 3rd party MS-DOS 7.10 CD-ROM
that's floating around the Internet. That's the general idea of what
I'd like.
Once that system format is done, and CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT are up,
then all of the rest is just copying files, which can be COPY *.*.
ACK
For learning any language, it helps a LOT to have a
copy of something
that you are familiar with in that language.? When she started to learn
Spanish, I gave her a copy of McCracken FORTRAN in Spanish (she was
familiar with, and had a copy of, the English edition), and loaned her
the international Win3.0 disc.? She then setup one machine with Win3 in
English, one in Chinese, and one in Spansish.
Win3.0 could run on an 8088, which were then a dime a dozen.
I don't know whether you could put more than one copy on a machine.? I
think that you could - we had a copy of Win3.1 on a Win95 machine!
I think you definitely could put more than one copy of Windows 3.x on a
single machine. The biggest point of contention I see would be parts of
CONFIG.SYS that reference drivers inside of the Windows directory.
However there are plenty of ways to deal with that. Beyond that, it's
just another directory that consumes disk space.
Aside: I've got a virtual machine with the following installed and
bootable using Microsoft boot options:
- MS-DOS 6.22
- Windows 3.11 (on top of MS-DOS 6.22)
- Windows 95
- Windows 98*
- Windows NT
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP
*I'm just shy of 100% certain that both 95 and 98 were on there.
I did it as an exercise to see if it would work, and it does. I think I
did the install in that order. MS-DOS 6.22 vs Windows 3.11 was simply a
matter of starting Windows (WIN) at the command prompt. Windows 95
brought in it's MSDOS.SYS based boot menu and allowed booting "MS-DOS"
(or something like that). I think Windows 98 had an option to augment
95's boot menu to allow both 95 and 98. Windows NT / 2000 / XP brought
in BOOT.INI and another "Older Windows" (nomenclature?) menu option as
well as NT / 2k / XP.
But, the Windows 3.10 BETA program sent us tons of
floppies.
I bet.
It had an even more demented problem: it installed
Smartdrv first.
Then, if it hit any error, the installation would fail, without the
usual option to IGNORE and manually copy the failed file later.
Instead, SMARTDRV cut out the options, and you could only R(etry)!? If
the error wasn't transient, then you could only power down the machine!
But SMARTDRV had told DOS that stuff was ALREADY written that it hadn't
done yet, so powering down wiped the whole installation.? I had one
machine that had an error that neither SpinRite nor SpeedStor could
find, but the Windoze installation consistently found it!? The work
around was to put a lot of extraneous files on the disk, so that the
sector with the error was used by something else.? I reported the
problem to the BETA support; their response was "That's a HARDWARE
problem, NOT OUR PROBLEM."? My comment that 1) any program should exit
gracefully even from a hardware problem, not lock up the machine and 2)
that SMARTDRV's actions would end up costing them substantially.? (It
DID; DOS 6.20 was written primarily to deal with SMARTDRV causing
problems!)? 'course my comment also meant that I wasn't invited back for
any other BETA programs; they only wanted cheerleaders, not critics nor
actual testers.
Ya. Thankfully (?) I started with computers after that and avoided
things like that.
It eliminated another LARGE box of floppies.
;-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die