China DOS Union

When booting fails, what does the screen display? Please copy it all down so that the error location can be located.

The GRUB version I released has no Chinese support.

Please provide a little more information. What you have here is information from the NTFS file system. But you didn't write its partition number, that is (hd?,?). Are you sure there is a GRLDR file in the root directory of this partition?

When it fails, what is the hard drive and number in (hd?,?)? Is the file system type of this partition (such as NTFS) correctly listed? These two points are important.

I have downloaded the latest GRLDR and it's being tested and used by multiple people. I'll write down problems in time.. I'll record relevant error messages in detail... Also, can Brother Budian provide the COMMAND file of FREEDOS, which is about 20K in size and can support FAT32 partitions, as well as several commonly used commands?

You can download it from freedos.org.

The 20K command is estimated to be unavailable.

An error code appears when booting. Only the GRLDR of the primary partition can be found, and other partitions cannot be found..

But this new version can indeed load the Chinese version of GRLDR. The previous version did not support the Chinese GRLDR. This time the size seems to be much smaller than last time.

I noticed that most of the logical partitions in your extended partition are in FAT32 format, with only one being NTFS. I guess it would fail with FAT32, while that NTFS one would still succeed. Please test again to see if that's the case, and then I'll modify the program.

Thanks.

Also, you mentioned loading the Chinese version of GRLDR. I want to know what method or command you used to load it? Can you post it for me to see?

Brother Budian, I have a few questions to ask:
1. For using grub4dos to virtually create a win98 in memory:
map --mem (hd0,0)/win98.img (fd0)
map --hook
chainloader (fd0)+1
rootnoverify (fd0)
boot
What are the requirements for win98.img here? How is it made? Is it directly saving the entire partition of the installed win98's C: drive with winimage?
2. I load a 2.88M image containing grub.exe and \boot\grub\(stage1,stage2) in a virtual machine, boot to DOS, and setup(fd0) prompts that stage1 is not found. Does grub4dos only support installation on 1.44M floppy disks?
3. Currently, does grub4dos support installation to a USB flash drive? For example, after my bootable USB flash drive boots the system and the drive letter in DOS is a:, then do I use setup (fd0) to install?

Thank you for your answer!

The following is a quote from Budian's post on March 6, 2005, 10:18:43:
I noticed that most of the logical partitions in your extended partition are in FAT32 format, and only one is NTFS. I guess it will fail in the case of FAT32, while that NTFS one will still succeed. Please test again to see if this is the case, and then I will modify the program.

Thanks.

Also, you mentioned loading the Chinese version of GRLDR. I want to know what method or command you used to load it? Can you post it for me to see?

It's not very good that FAT32 partitions are not supported. I have two NTFS partitions. The main partition can be found, but the extended NTFS partition still cannot be found...
To load the Chinese version of GRLDR, I extracted the boot sector of your new version of GRLDR and loaded it in the BOOT.INI of NTLOADER to find and start GANDALF's Chinese GRLDR....

hnlyzhd：

FAT must be supported. I found a few more errors related to the FAT format and am going to fix them. Not being able to find GRLDR in an extended NTFS partition is quite serious. I tested on my machine and it can be found in extended partitions, all NTFS format. I originally planned to release the official version in April, but it seems impossible.

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blue777：

1. What are the requirements for the win98.img here? How is it made? Directly use winimage to save the entire C: drive of a Windows 98 installation for the whole partition?
It's not saving the entire partition, but the entire hard disk. Partition virtualization is not supported yet, but will be in the future. Your hard drive needs to be smaller. If you find it inconvenient, you can wait until partition virtualization is supported to use this method.
2. I loaded a 2.88M image with grub.exe and \boot\grub\(stage1, stage2) in a virtual machine, booted to DOS, and setup(fd0) prompted that stage1 was not found. Does grub4dos only support installation on 1.44M floppy disks?

I won't study the old GNU GRUB installation method anymore. There are many problems with this method. The work I'm doing now, like supporting Linux partitions, is to eliminate this installation method. Try the installation method with grldr, it should be fine.

3. Does grub4dos currently support installation to a USB flash drive? For example, after a bootable USB flash drive boots the system and the drive letter in DOS is a:, then do you have to use setup (fd0) to install? Installation to a USB flash drive is completely possible. It's recommended to use the GRLDR method for installation. There are instructions on http://grub.linuxeden.com/. It doesn't say USB flash drive, but says floppy disk and hard disk. Try following the instructions.

There are reports of success and failure when installing to a USB flash drive. I tend to think that those who failed are mostly due to hidden BIOS bugs.

I just did more than a dozen tests again, all in the VM virtual machine, but the actual machine hard drive is loaded, which should be the same as the actual machine. The primary partition starts normally, but in the extended NTFS, it started only once, entering the GRUB command line mode...

The situation of the virtual machine is very special. This is not considered a problem, and for the time being, don't take this as a problem. Because during the BIOS stage, the virtual machine may have errors. Your disk is real, but the BIOS may be incorrect, so this may affect our operation process that completely relies on the BIOS. GRUB completely relies on the BIOS. Unlike Windows and Linux, both can access the disk independently of the BIOS.

Brother Budian, thank you for your reply. There are a few unclear points in the following method for booting a floppy disk with grldr:
b. Read the first sector of the floppy disk into memory area 1, and read the fourth sector of GRLDR into memory area 2.
c. Copy 60 bytes from 0x02 to 0x3d in memory area 1 to 0x02 to 0x3d in memory area 2.
d. Write the modified memory area 2 to the first sector of the floppy disk.
What software is used to read sectors into memory and write sectors to memory? Can you briefly explain the method steps?
Is WinHEX used to modify memory? How to define the first sector, second sector, third sector...? Thank you!

This passage is aimed at programmers. For non - programmers, it can be explained in the following simple language:

Simply put, in one sentence: Directly overwrite the first sector (that is, the DBR boot sector) of the floppy disk with the 4th sector of GRLDR. But there is one point to correct, which is described as follows:

In the 4th sector of GRLDR, the 60 bytes from offset 0x02 to 0x3d (that is, the 3rd to the 62nd bytes) are not program code but data, and these data must be taken from the corresponding area of the floppy disk. Otherwise, the floppy disk you made will not be in FAT format, and thus DOS will think it is not formatted.

That is, you have to find a way to save the 60 bytes from the 3rd to the 62nd bytes of the floppy disk, for example, record them on paper. Then use the 4th sector of GRLDR to overwrite the boot sector of the floppy disk. After that, use a diskeditor hexadecimal editor software to restore the 60 bytes from the 3rd to the 62nd bytes of the boot sector to the original old data on the floppy disk, that is, the values you just recorded. Then it's OK.

After this, copying a GRLDR file to the root directory of the floppy disk will make it a GRUB boot floppy disk.

This method is applicable to any FAT12/16 format floppy disk, whether it is a standard one or a non - standard one, and it will be successful.

A sector means a 512 - byte data block. The first sector is the first 512 bytes, the second sector is the 513th to 1024th bytes, and so on.