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- Freedos Install on former Win10 drive

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11-30-2017 05:31 PM
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.
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02-16-2018 10:54 AM
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".
11-30-2017 06:23 PM
> 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.
12-05-2017 06:30 AM
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.
12-05-2017 10:01 AM
> 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 ?
02-16-2018 10:54 AM
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".