How to install FreeDOS manually

[@davidgiffordsr.930]

I like your videos. First you speak very clearly. Your voice is easy to understand, and you have a relaxing manner. Your recording volume is perfect in that I do not have to have my volume turned all the way up to hear you very well. Am doing a full install onto a new to me computer which I will also add linux. Thanks for all your hard work over the years. Lookng forward to learning more about FrredDOS and using the programs I saved form the 90s!

[@freedosproject]

Thanks! Glad you like the videos - and welcome to the channel.

[@3miner655]

When i was booting FreeDOS from the CD-ROM and installing it automatically. it didn't work. but when i tried to manually install it just like in the video. the installation was a success!

[@freedosproject]

Excellent!

[@eduds6]

Hello Jim im having issues with a new uefi machine on legacy mode after booting to syslinux (lenovo s145 ryzen 3500u). I cannot either start freedos install on it or start the live environment, it just hangs when i try both options. Ive tested the same USB (with livecd and live environment) on a old Celeron machine, it works, but i cannot start fdapm to slow down the machine. It just hangs as well. No idea why it cannot support acpi, as i had freedos 1.2 on it installed and everything worked out of the box. What are my options? I would really like to use it on my new machine from live environment.

[@freedosproject]

I think the first question is did you boot the computer in Legacy mode when you tried to install FreeDOS? You mentioned "legacy mode" in your comment, but "just hangs" implies the system isn't really in Legacy mode - it's probably still in UEFI-only mode. FreeDOS needs Legacy mode because that provides a BIOS.

[@Mr.Nichan]

2:25 I missed something. How do you know the drive is called the C:/ drive. (I'm here because I want to install freeDOS on a particular partition. Actually, I wanted to install the full version of freeDOS on the USB stick instead of installing a FreeDOS installer on there.

[@StevenWilliams0302]

I have a problem. Fdisk only sees the thumb drive. I went ahead a partitioned the drive ahead of time and still nothing. I'm trying to setup freedos on a lenovo n22.

[@joshuabrown3654]

Hey! Thanks for the tutorial! I might end up needing it, but I'm encountering a problem during install that, from my Google searches, nobody else seems to have encountered before, ever. "Error transfering system files to C: A reboot may help." I looked for quite awhile to find a solution to this error. I even searched for the error message without the misspelled "transferring" but literally nothing. Why might it be having trouble transferring the files?

[@freedosproject]

A few guesses to help you debug - since you installed manually, you might have skipped a step, so I'm covering all bases here: 1. Did you create your partition with FDISK? 2. Did you format the partition with FORMAT? 3. Did you make the partition bootable, either with FORMAT/S or SYS? (Skipping this won't result in the error you listed, but if you installed manually, it's good to check) 4. How big is your C: drive? If it's not big enough, the disk will fill up and you will get that error 5. Did you eject the install CDROM during the install?

[@joshuabrown3654]

@@freedosproject Hey! Thanks for the response! So I haven't tried to install FreeDOS manually, yet. I've only tried to install 1.3 live via bootdisk so far (Award Green BIOS from 1994 won't allow me to boot direct from CD-ROM). I have formatted the partition with FDisk. C: drive is 1337MB. CD was never removed during install. I'm also having issues with regular MS-DOS, also. Any version of DOS (6.22, 5.0, etc.,) will not install and hangs on "Starting MS-DOS". It WILL, however, fully boot a Win95 bootdisk and get me to DOS from there.

[@thedogfan5126]

Is there usb suppport if you install off a usb

[@grappydingus]

If you boot FreeDOS from a USB you can use that USB to store your files, but you will not have USB support in FreeDOS, there are some USB drivers for DOS floating around, they take a fair amount of tinkering, I did manage to use a media card reader from USB with one of them.

[@freedosproject]

You'll need to use Legacy support in your BIOS. This will present the USB fob drive so FreeDOS can see it through BIOS.

[@megarubber]

Hey! I have a problem: In my computer exist 2 partitions (C:/ for Windows and F:/ for FreeDOS) and the installer doesn't find the F:/ partition. I use a USB flash drive with the FullUSB.iso, and it detects the flash drive partition (D:/). How can I change the partition letter D:/ to F:/ ? Details: F:/ is formated in FAT32

[@freedosproject]

The drive may not be recognized as F: in this case. If you have other partitions there for Windows 10, FreeDOS may not recognize them. Instead, you could try different drive letters to see where that partition is found. You might also run FreeDOS FDISK to display the partition table info. FDISK will show the drive letter that FreeDOS will use for it.

[@megarubber]

@FreeDOS Thanks for the reply and help! FDISK just display the D:/ partition and it doesn't show another partition to choose in Set Active Partition. I tried format F:/ in FAT16 and I changed the drive letter, but still not working. Do you have another suggestion?

[@freedosproject]

@@megarubber It sounds like your FreeDOS will be detected as the C: drive. DOS assigns drive letters at boot time, based on internal rules (first DOS partition on first hard drive, first DOS partition on second hard drive, etc) so will skip any non-DOS partitions - they are not assigned a drive letter. So I think FreeDOS is probably recognizing the FAT partition as the C: drive, and your flash drive as D: Did you create the "F:" partition from DOS or Windows? If you created it from Windows, I don't know how Windows10 sets up partitions. So it might have given that "F:" partition a partition type (ID) that FreeDOS does not recognize as a DOS drive. If you created this partition in Windows, I'd check again from Windows.

[@BulbaDos]

hot damn a tutorial that works! Thanks man.

[@freedosproject]

I'm glad it was useful! ☺

[@FirstnameLastname-fy7bl]

How do you install networking stack on FreeDOS and get it to actually work?

[@freedosproject]

I'll have to do a video about networking sometime. A few folks have asked about it.

[@FirstnameLastname-fy7bl]

@@freedosproject That would awesome! I tried and failed with finding the drivers for my card etc. Maybe you can do Lunduke calibration. I enjoyed your interview with him. Thanks for all your dedication and hard work with FreeDOS!

[@Megatog615]

FreeDOS 1.3 won't boot on my 486 machine after installation from floppies. I can run MS-DOS and Win95 just fine, though. Is there a bug with the bootloader? fdisk /mbr and sys c: didn't fix the problem.

[@freedosproject]

My initial guess is you didn't SYS the C: drive, but you said you did. It will be difficult to debug over KZbin comments. Could you email the freedos-user email list instead?

[@derbguy]

i cant format it as bootable it says WARNING: Running SYS failed. can you help i know the video was made 3 years ago my laptop was running windows 7 and i want to do it to see how usable DOS is on modern devices and the installer wont work

[@freedosproject]

It's going to be hard to troubleshoot this in KZbin comments. It would be better to email the freedos-user list about this. You can join at www.freedos.org/forums/ (or you can ask on our FreeDOS group on Facebook)

[@jeffreyplum5259]

I would like to see a freeDos installation under Dosemu2 on linux, It include FreeDos but there is little information on configuring it Freedoos to customize it.

[@freedosproject]

It's been a while since I used DOSEMU. But I really liked htat DOSEMU mapped your C: drive to a folder in your $HOME directory - so you could update files from Linux and have them immediately appear in DOS. That's how I wrote most of my FreeDOS utilities, with GNU Emacs on Linux but compile and debug on FreeDOS in DOSEMU. I'll have to try out DOSEMU2 and look at it for a future video.

[@btaranto]

Beautiful

[@freedosproject]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@AndrewTubbiolo]

Holy carp if you had released this OS back in the 80's Melinda Gates would be divorcing you this year. What a well structured DOS. This is the kind of 16 bit OS The Lord God Jehova intended for his flock. Wow.

[@freedosproject]

😃

[@2ndborn283]

Can I remove my windows completely and install freedos.

[@freedosproject]

Yes you can. If your PC has an Intel CPU and a BIOS, you should be able to run FreeDOS. Note that you may need other drivers to support wireless networking.

[@marwanandthecat4114]

i want to install freedos on uefi built in shell plz help

[@freedosproject]

If you set your UEFI to "Legacy" mode you should be fine.

[@Pdrum2]

Hey, I have a question, if I change the drive letter on an empty partition to C would it install to that partition?

[@freedosproject]

How do you change a driver letter on a partition? That's not how this works in DOS. With DOS systems, the drive letters are determined automatically. A and C are reserved for the floppy drives. The first active primary DOS partition (usually on the first hard disk) is labeled C. Then other primary DOS partitions on other hard drives. Then logical DOS partitions in any extended partitions. So if you swapped out the order of the hard drives - yes, that would change the C drive. But to your question: you can choose a different install target drive by exiting the installer and running the installer in Advanced mode by running: setup adv

[@Pdrum2]

​@@freedosproject Ohh ok, so basically C drive is assigned to the whole hard drive. I guess I'll have to try that. How do I get to the advance mode, is setup adv the command?

[@freedosproject]

@@Pdrum2 Not the whole hard drive, but the DOS partition on it. For example, FreeDOS does not recognize Linux partitions and ignores them (not presented as C: or another drive letter) And yes, to run the installer in advanced mode, first exit the installer, then run the "setup adv" command.

[@Pdrum2]

@@freedosproject Oh ok thanks

[@Pdrum2]

@@freedosproject I typed setup adv in the command and a different install came up with red colors, and eventually it got to the "Drive C does not appear to be partitioned. Do you want to partition your drive?" Is there settings past this? I don't want to partition C drive of course.

[@tesseract4187]

If I buy a laptop that only have freeDOS can I install linux on it and ubuntu? Some people say that it's creating some sort of incompatibility ... is that true?

[@tesseract4187]

@Wafficus wow, that sounds complicated... I truly appreciate your comment... I'll have to make a research on how could I make that happen. Thank you very much

[@tesseract4187]

@Wafficus thanks! Also, first time I've "heard" someone say ," ubuntu sucks" 😄 ... but this is great information, I'm happy to learn from people who know what they are talking about.

[@sanjaykhatri999]

1st :- DOS(or MS-DOS) and FREEDOS are different. Preinstalled laptops have MS-DOS installed not FREEDOS 2nd :- Yes you are right in some situations linux (like ubuntu,fedora,redhat,opensuse etc) are not properly installed on your system. For this you have to try latest version of linux or different linux distros. 3rd :-Think for what purpose you buy that laptop. Is your need programs are windows based or other like linux?

[@freedosproject]

@@sanjaykhatri999 Actually, some laptops do have FreeDOS installed.

[@freedosproject]

Here's what I do: when I bought my computer at home, it came with Windows on it. I wiped the hard drive to get rid of Windows, and reinstalled it with Fedora Linux. And when I want to boot FreeDOS, I use a PC emulator like QEMU. It's easy! So to answer your question more directly: Yes, you can take any PC system that has any operating system on it and put Linux on it.

[@LaChimaera]

where is Italian? freeDos 1.3rc3 have not installed it.

[@freedosproject]

FreeDOS installs the language files in C:\FDOS\NLS so you can check there for *.IT files. The Italian language files end with the "IT" file extension. In FreeDOS 1.3RC3, I see language files for Choice, Diskcopy, Edlin, Fc, Find, Htmlhtlp, Mem, More, Move, Sort, Tree, and Xcopy.

[@bettyswunghole3310]

Hi - I hope someone can help. I want to install freedos on the hard drive of an old PC from the USB. I download the FD12FULL.zip file from the website onto my USB, but when I try to boot my old PC from the USB I get an error "No Operating System Found" (or words to that effect). I guess I need to make the USB bootable. Could I do this using FORMAT /S from Windows 10?Assuming I now have a bootable USB, how do I then proceed? Is there some kind of install program I need to download? Any suggestions (non-rude ones!) would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks!

[@bettyswunghole3310]

Fear not! I've figured it out!

[@freedosproject]

Good that you figured it out! KZbin comments are not usually the best place to ask for help. I didn't see this until today. Best to ask on the email lists or on a forum.

[@shade4040]

Hey, Nice Video can I install freedos on a Uefi system?

[@freedosproject]

Not a strictly UEFI system - but any Intel system built before 2020 will have a "Legacy" mode in the UEFI. That "Legacy" provides a BIOS, which is what FreeDOS needs. I understand all AMD UEFI provide a "Legacy" mode, but I am not sure.

[@shade4040]

@@freedosproject unfortunately my mainboard only supports UEFI, Thanks for your quick reply

[@miryambell4870]

Help, I can't get to drive D

[@freedosproject]

If you're running FreeDOS in a PC emulator, make sure the virtual machine didn't "detach" the CDROM image. Some emulators will do that after installation.

[@radeonblue1816]

Please share your email sir.

[@freedosproject]

You can find it on the FreeDOS website. 😉