DOS ain't dead

Hello,
I can`t boot any Freedos from HDD of notebook DELL D600 :(
The notebook reboots without any notice! Any idea??
Thanks David

Even the absolute minimal FreeDOS without any AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS does not boot?
Is the HDD properly formated into FAT32 and uses MBR (not UEFI) partitioning scheme?

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DOS-u-akbar!

More information, please.

Did it boot correctly at one time? If so, did you change anything between when it booted and now when it doesn't.

> reboots without any notice!

You mean without any messages at all? Please tell us what messages are displayed on the screen (or at least the final message before it reboots) so we can tell how far into the bootup process it gets. Does it make any diagnostic/error beeps?

> Any idea??

I'm not familiar with that particular model. But if a computer gets to a certain point and "auto-reboots", it might possibly be a hardware problem.

Is the CMOS backup battery ok (that is, not depleted)? They don't last forever, especially if the system has been left off for a long while.

Is the main battery dying (assuming it is properly charged)? They have a limited lifespan as well.

Is the voltage out of the AC adapter ok? Are you using the correct AC adapter (voltage and current rating)?

Will it boot from a bootup diskette? (Everyone should have an emergency diskette for situations like this. And other situations....)

- Doug B.

It doesn't have a floppy but he could use freedos live/install CD. I suspect it is wrongly formatted HDD/MBR/DBR problem. DOS should run on such PC.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Yes, FreeDOS does not delete all HDD, broken GNU/Linux bootloader
as part MBR which is not 512bytes can not use FreeDOS boot :(

> Yes, FreeDOS does not delete all HDD, broken GNU/Linux bootloader
> as part MBR which is not 512bytes can not use FreeDOS boot :(

And did you tried fdisk /mbr ? Or windows recovery console and use similar command to overwrite mbr code?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Yes, FreeDOS does not delete all HDD

Use DBAN

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This is a LOGITECH mouse driver, but some software expect here
the following string:*** This is Copyright 1983 Microsoft ***

> And did you tried fdisk /mbr ? Or windows recovery console and use similar
> command to overwrite mbr code?
No, I cleared disk by head -qc 10m /dev/zero >/dev/sda
the best way to clean hdd

And does it work now?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.