DR-DOS

[Liam Proven]

I hope this is vintage enough.

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.

Anyway, if anyone wants a bootable diskette image with DR-DOS 7.01-08,
complete with FAT32 support -- apparently it can even boot from it --
let me know.

-- 
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