Freedos Install on former Win10 drive

[timatboston]

Is there a particular/special machine bios configuration for installing FreeDOS on this style PC? 

It is optionally sold with FreeDOS so I know it should work.

I get an error stating that it "cannot find packages".  Addtionally, I've noticed that the CDrom driver fails to load using the stock FreeDOS installer.  I suspect a BIOS type issue as this type of failure happened on another machine ... changing the HD from ACHI to ATA in that machine's bios resolved the issue.

NOTE: I erased factory installed Windows 10 on this machine to install FreeDOS.

[mdklassen]

> NOTE: I erased factory installed Windows 10 on this machine.

What you may have is a "GPT" formatted disk-drive -- namely, the first few blocks on the disk are in that format, rather than the older format, and that format cannot be recognized by the replacement installer.

Attach the disk-drive as a secondary disk-drive on a Windows system, and use the "clean" option of the 'DISKPART' command to zero-out those few blocks, to return the disk-drive to the original "uninitialized" state.

[timatboston]

Unfortunately, this did not resolve the issue.  A disk cloner was used to completely wipe the disk such that nothing remained. 

This would be a good opportunity for HP to provide the bios and other pc configuration settings on their website and/or provide a FreeDOS install download image.

[mdklassen]

> I get an error stating that it "cannot find packages". 

Is that the full text of the error-message ?

Experiment: on a working computer, copy 100% of the content of the Installation Media into a folder, just to see if there are any input/output errors when reading the media.

Or, use software to take the Installation Media, which I assume is on CD media, and create an '.ISO' file.

Use that software to create a bootable USB memory-stick from that ISO.

Boot your computer from the memory-stick, to bypass usage of the optical device.

> Additionally, I've noticed that the CDrom driver fails to load using the stock FreeDOS installer. 

Any error-message?

> This would be a good opportunity for HP to provide the bios and other pc configuration settings on their website ...

HP does have comprehensive web-sites for each model of their computer.  What do you think is "missing" ?

Are you sure that there are specific BIOS-settings that are necessary for installing/using any software other than Windows 10 ?

[timatboston · Accepted solution]

Thank you to everyone who responded. 

I recently got back to this project after another project.  I believe that the issue with using a CD to install the OS after erasing the hard disk is due to the PC being a modern PC and the CD based FreeDOS install using an old CDROM driver as described at:
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/bugs/158/

I was able install from a memory stick created in linux (as described by the above URL):

The images can be written to pen drive easily using a Mac, Linux or BSD system by just using the dd command. Similar to these for a Mac command lines:
diskUtil list
sudo dd if=FD12FULL.img of=/dev/disk5

I still don't have DVD access yet which is why I expect that to be the issue based on FreeDOS bug 158. 

BTW: The actual msg was: "Unable to locate the installation packages".