UEFI Booting

  • SpinRite Release Candidate #5 Posted
    Guest:
    Another heads-up for anyone who's interested in remaining current with SpinRite as it moves from pre-release to final v6.1. The DOS executable "SRPR.EXE" now being offered by GRC's pre-release page has been updated to Pre-Release #5. Only one error was found in RC4: When the log exceeded more than 113,359 lines, the oldest lines were not being discarded from the on-screen "scroll-back" buffer. That's fixed in RC5. Otherwise, so far as anyone knows, SpinRite 6.1 is finally ready for the world. This interim FAQ page has pre-release downloading details.
    /Steve.
  • Be sure to checkout “Tips & Tricks”
    Dear Guest Visitor → Once you register and log-in:

    This forum does not automatically send notices of new content. So if, for example, you would like to be notified by mail when Steve posts an update to his blog (or of any other specific activity anywhere else), you need to tell the system what to “Watch” for you. Please checkout the “Tips & Tricks” page for details about that... and other tips!

    /Steve.

M

Mervyn Haynes

Swerv
Sep 17, 2020
209
58
65
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.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Barry Wallis
@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)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Barry Wallis
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)
Click to expand...
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?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Barry Wallis
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.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ben Crouch, TPS and Barry Wallis
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.
Click to expand...
Sad, but true.
 
  • Like
Reactions: TPS
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.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ben Crouch and Barry Wallis
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Ben Crouch and BobEd
Barry Wallis said:
I used QEMM.
Click to expand...
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!!!! ;)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Barry Wallis
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. :)
Click to expand...
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back