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Isn't DOS a horrible operating system to run these days? It doesn't support any energy management,

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Hey, that's awesome, thanks. Looks like there's instructions for making a FreeDOS bootable USB drive with makebootfat . Do you know if there's anything special I have to do (eg. config the existing D510 BIOS) to make the D510 boot that FreeDOS USB drive? I've actually got a few of these D510s, and it could be a lot better to run AGP videocards on them than to buy new PCs with the same resulting specs.

Not just your own, but every PC you might need to fix?

PCs that can't boot from USB are in need of replacement even if only due to being slower than the slowest PC made even three years ago. At some point, you can just replace it with a small-form-factor PC and even the savings on the electricity bill will pay for the replacement.

Including booting DOS 6.22 for flashing the BIOS?

Why boot Microsoft DOS when you can boot FreeDOS?

You could extend FAT32 to handle bigger drives. The 2TB limit comes from the fact the the volume size is limited to 2^32 sectors. With a hard disk that's 2TB.

One possibility would be to add a 32 bit volume size in clusters field to the FSInfo sector which already contains the first free cluster and the free cluster count. FAT32 has the upper 4 bits in a FAT entry marked as reserved which limits you to 2^28 clusters. You bump the filesystem version in the bootsector and use all of the bits in a FAT entry. With those two changges you could have 2^32 clusters which is 256TB with 64K clusters.

It's the same with the 4GB limit. You could use one of the spare bytes in the directory entry to have more bits of filesize. Some Doses do this and call it FAT+

Mind you, the reason people use FAT32 is because it is supported by everything. If you did either of these things you'd end up with a file system which wasn't supported by anyone. Old implementations would either corrupt volumes which were more than 2TB or had files bigger than 4GB or fail to mount them.

Now Microsoft have something called exFAT, a completely new filesystem which is incompatible with FAT32 and patented so it's not really in their interests to keep adding features to FAT32 which is now more or less open. At least I don't think many people paid them royalties and they haven't sued anyone to get them.

For previous FreeDOS releases, I used FreeDOS ODIN, which is a single disk with a lot of utilities, similar to those DR-DOS utility disks that come with everything these days. But for today's release, I decided to make my own 1.44MB utility disk, patterned after ODIN: http://www.finnix.org/Balder

There's no such things as FreeDOS nowadays, which was developped to late to be anything useful, specially it's not used by many people (including hardware manufacturer and corporate IT staff) to build bootdisks used to flash and upgrade firmwares and BIOSes(1). Neither is it used by computer manufacturer who signed an agreement with a popular OS company that forbids them to sell a computer without an OS.

Whith such an exemple of another old system, we can be sure that nobody will find whatever use for ReactOS, given the fact that Windows Vista will retain no compatibility with a legacy of win32 APPs and has nothing to do with the NT family which is emulated by ReactOS and Wine. And ReactOS and Wine have stated that they will never, I mean really never try to implement more modern API like Win64 and thus won't be able to run all the huge amount of 64bit apps that are seen everywhere (and of which most aren't open-source anyway and aren't ported to linux either (2) ).

ReactOS is likely to die and go the Linux/BSD way. Netcraft is confirming it in Soviet Russia. In Korea, only old people find usefulness to free and open alternatives that retain compatibility to commercial versions.

Har, har, har.

1 - bootdisks and -CD are specially popular in big places where you need to quickly upgrade BIOSes and Firmware non-interactively just by pluging a disc. The same can't be achieved from windows yet (there are windows-based flasher, but they can't be deployed thru usual network channels as software update)
2 - Windows 64bits is once again a proof of the supperiority of open-source. The first softwares that was the most easily ported to Win64 API were the open-source one, were the developpement is much easier because of source code availability : 7Zip, Blender&Yafray, Mame, FireFox, PuTTY, POV, VirtualDub, and many other. Where as only a couple of commercial games (because they make nice tech demos in booths) were ported, and almost no commercial multimedia package (although multimedia was supposed to benefit the most from the increased memory address space and was hoped to be among the first ported to Win64).

Find me a DOS version that supports USB hardware, and a USB storage device that can talk to DOS over said hardware, AND that I can boot DOS from if I need to, and I will consider giving up floppies.

• http://www.fdos.org/freedos/news/newsitem/149.html
• http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021003S0 007
• http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm (how-to)

• Util from HP that some claim works with generic USB drives
  

File sharing in itself is not illegal, what is illegal is sharing files you don't have the right (COPYRIGHT) to share. If I wanted to send someone a copy of my one-disk FreeDOS distribution over DCC, that's 100% legal, although that is P2P file sharing.

-uso.

Sure - try DOSEMU with FreeDOS ripcord.

If it doesn't work, try dosemu with DR-DOS - not open source, but at least $0.