China DOS Union

windrv: private messages only have space for 500 characters, so I'll reply here.

> Hello!
> How is your help?

Mm, I'm still under treatment. It's really a pleasant surprise — I may basically recover my health. But the overall principle won't change: I'll only do some small things, and I won't get involved in difficult development work. Thank you and bean for the help you gave me during that grim period. Your help played a decisive role (the illness was caused by both physical and psychological factors).

> You did a great job on GRUB For DOS.
> It can map a particular hd to a virtual image and boot it.
>
> Could I know whether it can be done under DOS to prevent the access of a particular HD by DOS
> completely and restore its access by running a DOS program? Grub.exe seems needing rebooting.

If you want to emulate a certain disk under a running (active) DOS, unexpected things may happen (for example, a crash). But if it's only a matter of blocking a certain disk, it may be possible. However, you should consider that the C: drive is also in an active state — for example, the resident part of Command.com is in memory, while the transient part is on the hard disk. This situation must be taken into account. Perhaps it can be dealt with by changing the COMSPEC environment variable. Of course, if a disk is not being accessed by any process in memory, then such a disk can be disabled 【this is my preliminary view】.

GRUB's emulation code can be used for the kind of dynamic emulation mentioned above 【including even seemingly dangerous operations such as adding a virtual hard disk, etc.】. Disabling a hard disk is just a special case of emulation. map --disable-chs-mode --disable-lba-mode (hd1) (hd1) disables (hd1)

You can even leave GRUB entirely and operate directly under DOS. What GRUB does is nothing more than use 2K of space at the top of conventional memory as the int13 code. The map command-line parameters 【also placed in the above 2K area】 can all be modified transparently under DOS. So if you want to disable or enable it, both are very simple.

Roughly, these are the issues that may need attention:

1。The BIOS data area contains the total number of hard disks and the total number of floppy drives, and it would be best if it reflected the real changes.

2。When adding the 2K GRUB emulation code, the values at 0x040e and 0x0413 in conventional memory need to be changed. Removing the code also requires changing these two values. Of course, if you are only modifying the map command-line parameters at the end of the 2K code, then there is no need to change the values at these two places.

3。When copying the 2K GRUB code to the top of conventional memory, take care not to overwrite any TSR there, and also not to damage the extended BIOS data area. Besides that, you also have to modify the memory allocation chain (that is, the arena structure) to ensure the integrity of the memory chain allocation, otherwise the system will die or become unstable.

That's about all I can think of.

The following is quoted from 不点 at 2004-5-2 10:44:06:
These past few days I've been thinking about a problem, and I keep feeling there is no perfect solution. Today, May 2, suddenly my eyes lit up, and I thought of the WINDRV software from your company that brother windrv mentioned before. First let me talk about the problem I ran into:

Two years ago, a friend asked me to set up a machine for him. I put together a P4, 128M RAM, 40G hard disk machine. This friend had never used a computer before, so he wasn't familiar with windows, could barely use it, and linux was out of the question. If I installed windows, he often went online and played games, so viruses would definitely be frequent visitors. He lives far away from me, and I couldn't possibly keep going over there to fix system crashes, reinstall the system, and so on. If I installed linux, then there would be no viruses, but he wouldn't know how to use it either. A lot of software doesn't exist under linux, and documents from windows aren't very compatible when opened under linux either. In the end, this is how I handled it for him: under linux I used vmware to emulate a virtual windows98. He has used it for two years, and nothing has gone wrong with it【such as crashes and the like】.

But linux starts slowly; after linux finishes booting, vmware still has to start, which adds nearly another minute of startup time, so the total boot time is three or four times that of plain win98 alone. Living with that for a long time is unbearable. Also, under vmware midi can't be played, VCDs can't be watched, and some games won't run. —— As a linux enthusiast, all I could do was shake my head helplessly.

I also tried win4lin. Speed is not a problem there, it's very fast, but in some respects it's still not as good as vmware. For example, vmware can make a virtual hard disk non-writable, which prevents virus attacks. But win4lin doesn't have that option. If you make win4lin's C:\windows directory read-only, win98 won't boot. win4lin also has the problems of not being able to play midi music, not being able to watch VCDs, and not being able to play some games. —— As a linux enthusiast, once again I could only shake my head helplessly.

Just when I was thinking hard about it, WINDRV software suddenly flashed through my mind. To be honest, before this I never cared about windrv at all, because I myself had been using linux all along and had basically stopped using windows completely. But faced with this friend's machine, I found myself in a difficult spot. It looks like only windrv offers some hope.

Excited, I went to windrv.net. The site feels okay, looks professional, and has a lot of materials. But I still felt there were things I wasn't satisfied with.

1。It seems the website doesn't state the system's hardware requirements and software requirements prominently. Is my 128M RAM enough or not? Naturally that's the thing I care about most. If not, how much more RAM is needed?

2。Can it guarantee that viruses won't damage the system? If the user goes online, viruses will definitely come in, and once a virus acts up, it's possible for the whole system to be ruined. Can it be like VMWARE and protect the hard disk so that viruses can't alter it?【Of course, a CIH virus could still destroy the motherboard BIOS, so in that respect it certainly still can't protect as tightly as vmware】. This is the question I care about most, and I guess it's a difficult one. By the way, I hate antivirus software and never use any antivirus software at all. Antivirus software is like today's police—they don't necessarily always do good things.

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One suggestion: the site's documentation is all in English, which is tiring to read. It would be best to have a Chinese version. Also, I feel these documents are not all that simple and easy to understand. They should really be organized better so that an outsider can understand them easily. The screenshots are blurry too. I suggest not shrinking the screenshots.

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Supplement: looking at your screenshots, on win98 you're using the opera browser. I don't know whether IE still exists or not. Of course, if you can get rid of IE completely, that would be even better. I haven't used opera, but I have used mozilla. It's excellent; at the moment I feel no browser comprehensively beats mozilla.

mozilla's Chinese localization is very good. Versions in other languages are available too.

Search for “mozilla Chinese localization” on www.google.com, and you can download the latest mozilla1.6 version.

Thank you very much for your suggestions and advice.

For the second question first, WINDRV can be used on a standalone computer,
running disklessly, starting up with a removeable MO or USB hard disk or a CD.
So virus infection is never a problem.

For the first question about RAM requirement, using running win9x normally with
a hard disk, you need at least 32M RAM, on this forum, there is much discussion
of Mini9x. WINDRV helps implementing it with the Build List Manager and also
taking it to run in RAM with the help of our 16bit ramdisk driver.

So the RAM requirement depends on how large in size your win9x and the
applications you want to put into RAM to run with it . With win98, we can even
compress the image, about doubling the size. So if your Win9x plus applications
have a size of 150M, then it is compressed to about 80 to 90M, 128M of RAM is
possible.

Also, the more ram you have, the more you gain because of compression.

The best implementation is for 640M or something like that.

WINDRV has been tested to run with 2G RAM. WINDRV at present will utilize
up to 1.2G RAM and you can compress it; so it can hold a 2.4G image. The
rest of RAM, 2G-1.2G=0.8G is to be used by Windows.

About the documentation, it will be written up in the coming weeks. And
translation into Chinese will be done immediately afterwards.

IE can of course be removed. 98lite helps you to do this.