UEFI Booting

  • SpinRite v6.1 Release #3
    Guest:
    The 3rd release of SpinRite v6.1 is published and may be obtained by all SpinRite v6.0 owners at the SpinRite v6.1 Pre-Release page. (SpinRite will shortly be officially updated to v6.1 so this page will be renamed.) The primary new feature, and the reason for this release, was the discovery of memory problems in some systems that were affecting SpinRite's operation. So SpinRite now incorporates a built-in test of the system's memory. For the full story, please see this page in the "Pre-Release Announcements & Feedback" forum.
    /Steve.
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    Dear Guest Visitor → Once you register and log-in please checkout the “Tips & Tricks” page for some very handy tips!

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  • BootAble – FreeDOS boot testing freeware

    To obtain direct, low-level access to a system's mass storage drives, SpinRite runs under a GRC-customized version of FreeDOS which has been modified to add compatibility with all file systems. In order to run SpinRite it must first be possible to boot FreeDOS.

    GRC's “BootAble” freeware allows anyone to easily create BIOS-bootable media in order to workout and confirm the details of getting a machine to boot FreeDOS through a BIOS. Once the means of doing that has been determined, the media created by SpinRite can be booted and run in the same way.

    The participants here, who have taken the time to share their knowledge and experience, their successes and some frustrations with booting their computers into FreeDOS, have created a valuable knowledgebase which will benefit everyone who follows.

    You may click on the image to the right to obtain your own copy of BootAble. Then use the knowledge and experience documented here to boot your computer(s) into FreeDOS. And please do not hesitate to ask questions – nowhere else can better answers be found.

    (You may permanently close this reminder with the 'X' in the upper right.)

M

Mervyn Haynes

Swerv
Sep 17, 2020
238
64
66
London UK
I think this topic deserves it own thread!
As we know most new PC will not have the ability to boot into legacy mode, so cannot take part in this.
I have 3 laptops, 2 which have legacy mode, but 1 does not, they are all Dell XPs 15s.
 
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@Mervyn Haynes: Once we open the various ReadSpeed forums, it was my intention that the “Booting DOS” forum there would be the place for this. There's already been some general discussions of this, here, and it's not clear to me that there's much more to say about it other than none of this stuff will boot on any UEFI-only system for the time being. And for those systems that can (with some nudging) boot to DOS, that forum will be the place where our DOS booting gurus (and we have a bunch here) will be able to help others. (y)
 
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Steve said:
@Mervyn Haynes: Once we open the various ReadSpeed forums, it was my intention that the “Booting DOS” forum there would be the place for this. There's already been some general discussions of this, here, and it's not clear to me that there's much more to say about it other than none of this stuff will boot on any UEFI-only system for the time being. And for those systems that can (with some nudging) boot to DOS, that forum will be the place where our DOS booting gurus (and we have a bunch here) will be able to help others. (y)
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Don't get me wrong Steve, I grew up with DOS, and loved it. I remember trying to get close to that mythical 640k lower memory as possible with memory managers.
But times move on, and I think this UEFI matter needs addressing sooner rather than later.
What do other forum members think?
 
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It's NOT a quick and small thing, Mervyn. It means removing all DOS dependency from SpinRite and converting it from an application of DOS to its own mini OS. Given that everyone wants a SpinRite update, and that NO earlier PCs have any need for this, it makes far more sense to make SpinRite much more useful to nearly everyone first, and then tackle what will not be a small change.
 
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Steve said:
It's NOT a quick and small thing, Mervyn. It means removing all DOS dependency from SpinRite and converting it from an application of DOS to its own mini OS. Given that everyone wants a SpinRite update, and that NO earlier PCs have any need for this, it makes far more sense to make SpinRite much more useful to nearly everyone first, and then tackle what will not be a small change.
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Sad, but true.
 
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When you bought SpinRite, you received no promise that it would work on new things not then invented. (At least I don't believe @Steve would be crazy enough to make such promises.) He's doing his best to add support for some devices that came out after SpinRite 6, but I don't think you can fairly expect him to support an entirely different system architecture for free. 6.1 is meant to be a free update to add support for [very] large drives and a faster means to scan them. 7.0 will presumably be a re-write to support the current state of the art in booting (UEFI) but will not necessarily be a free upgrade for older version owners.
 
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PHolder said:
When you bought SpinRite, you received no promise that it would work on new things not then invented. (At least I don't believe @Steve would be crazy enough to make such promises.) He's doing his best to add support for some devices that came out after SpinRite 6, but I don't think you can fairly expect him to support an entirely different system architecture for free. 6.1 is meant to be a free update to add support for [very] large drives and a faster means to scan them. 7.0 will presumably be a re-write to support the current state of the art in booting (UEFI) but will not necessarily be a free upgrade for older version owners.
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It's a pleasant surprise that Steve is doing all he can to support all current drive architectures and sizes within the "must be able to boot to DOS" constraint for free for all current SpinRite owners.
 
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Barry Wallis said:
I used QEMM.
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Also remember using Memmaker & MSD to see how all the drivers were loaded into high memory. It made a difference which order you loaded them, as some would reduce their size after being loaded, so it made sense to load them first. But QEMM was the best one to use, I think once I did get only about 1K used in lower memory!

Ah, the good old days

I think I have gone off topic on this post!!!! ;)
 
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I remember those days. I managed to get about 635KB free with the networking stack loaded as well ( Novell Netware over token ring)
 
Ah nostalgia feels...

I remember QEMM and all the hard work to get memory freed up, also I remember 2M iirc that allowed 1.44mb floppies to be formatted larger than that, I probably have a few of those floppies around heh, I doubt I will see the data on them again though (unless I can breathe life into the table legs (current job for my two 286 IBM servers) that I rescued when they got decommissioned, that have 2.88mb drives, those should be able, with dos, to run 2M and get access to the diskettes unless those have faded.

Also because I liked norton commander and um 4dos iirc command interpreter, that I wrote batch scripts for to help automate some tasks I wanted to do. I resisted for so long to start using windows (any version), and one of the few programs I enjoyed there was that card thing, that allowed keeping short notes, and that seems to not exist for current windows, I am sure one can find a program like that again though, but I have better things to hold my snippets of data now (maybe others will like the combination of notepad++ and cherrytree for keeping data).

I dislike how after win98se the fight was lost with keeping windows properly stripped down, I mean I got somewhat close in winxp too, but now win7 and later it is really hard to have full control of what processes are allowed to remain running, I do not know each of them and what they do anymore and that is unsettling. I would prefer a computer that only runs processes that I know what they do, and that actually do something that I want them to do, not a billion useless background tasks, this is my computer not Microsofts.

At any rate rant over :)
 
Steve said:
386MAX was my memory manager of choice. QuarterDeck's QEMM was good too. But Bob Smith's 386MAX had a few additional bells and whistles. :)
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386Max, that was the other one I could not think of.

But after purchasing QEMM there was not much point (cost wise) of buying another memory manager. Also I think people were very loyal to the manager they purchased back then, and poo hooed all the others.
 
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