I installed the latest FreeDOS on my sandbox PC being careful not to wipe grub used by openSUSE-12.1. I find it useful to have another different operating system (from GNU/Linux) on a PC, and in the case of this OLD PC, FreeDOS is what I prefer to have in place.
This old Sandbox PC has an MSI KT3 Ultra (KT333) motherboard with a 32-bit athlon-1100 CPU, a nVidia FX5200 graphic card, and 2 GB of RAM. I have an empty VERY SMALL ~500 MB partition on the PC in the position of /dev/sda1 already formatted as FAT16, and so that was where I decided to place FreeDOS.
Download FreeDOS:
I note there is a recent update to FreeDOS to version-1.1. One can find FreeDOS on this website: Free DOS website. I downloaded the .iso file fd11src.iso and burned it to a CD, in preparation for the install.
Preparation/Backups
I first checked the hard drive on my Sandbox PC, and I noted that /dev/sda2 was the active partition, and also / (root) for my openSUSE-12.1 installation. Checking my paper notes I also remembered that on the /dev/sda2 MBR of this Sandbox PC is a generic MBR from a recent openSUSE-12.1 install.
Here is the “ fdisk -l “ output :
Code:
Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000bcd34
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 1044224 522081 6 FAT16
/dev/sda2 * 1044225 52243379 25599577+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 52243380 54283634 1020127+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 54283635 625137344 285426855 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 54283698 515076029 230396166 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 515076093 566275184 25599546 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 566275248 625137344 29431048+ 83 Linux
(I removed the /dev/sdb from this print out as it is not relevant.
I decided to backup the Master Boot Record (MBR) of this Sandbox PC before proceeding.
So I opened a terminal with root permissions and typed:
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=mbr-sda-sandbox-before-freedos-install-440 bs=440 count=1
and then I copied the file mbr-sda-sandbox-before-freedos-install-440 to a memory stick, having it handy in case I needed it to restore the MBR (which was not the case as things turned out).
I decided for FreeDOS to install I wanted /dev/sda1 as the active partition. So I booted to a PartedMagic liveCD and I ran gparted, changing the boot (active) partition from /dev/sda2 to /dev/sda1 (it turns out that FreeDOS also has a tool that will allow this change to be made, so PartedMagic was not necessary).
FreeDOS install
I then booted to the FreeDOS installation CD, and noted it was intending to install on the first partition on the hard drive (which it called c: ) which was about 500 Mbytes (ie it was the /dev/sda1).
The FreeDOS install was pretty painless, except when I encountered this menu asking what to do with the PC's master boot record ….
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while I was deliberating that screen, it timed out (to my surprise) and the PC proceeded to reboot, direct to FreeDOS. So I did not know for certain what (if anything) FreeDOS did to the MBR, although I did recall reading somewhere previous (to this install) that FreeDOS by default won't touch the MBR.
Here is the FreeDOS boot selection :
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Here is the FreeDOS screen after boot:
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Here is the result of 'dir' showing this c: drive is pretty much empty.
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cont ….
