DOS ain't dead

Has anyone luck in trying RDOS?

I myself tried building it with no luck. Maybe a prebuilt virtual machine will be the choice.

http://www.rdos.net/rdos/

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If anyone is interested Leif Ekblad, the main project developer, provided me a bootable image: http://www.rdos.net/rdos/ShowVideoModes.zip

> If anyone is interested Leif Ekblad, the main project developer, provided
> me a bootable image: http://www.rdos.net/rdos/ShowVideoModes.zip

This is in the form of an IMG file. I tried to process the IMG file
inside WIN10 but I cet "corrupt" error messages. But I don't think
it is really corrupt.

Could someone give me some instructions please?

I don't have a floppy or CDDVD so I need to make a USB stick.

C1Steve

Thank you

I converted to VDI to mount it in an VM, but you can use https://www.askvg.com/win32-disk-imager-write-any-bootable-image-to-usb-drive-in-windows/ and create a bootable USB image.

> I converted to VDI to mount it in an VM, but you can use
> https://www.askvg.com/win32-disk-imager-write-any-bootable-image-to-usb-drive-in-windows/
> and create a bootable USB image.


After extracting I have a file named RDOS.BIN.

What do I do with this?


C1Steve

You should be able too boot your system after imaging it to an USB drive.

> You should be able too boot your system after imaging it to an USB drive.

Using BinToIso I was able to make an ISO file from the BIN.
But I'm not sure it is good.

I used RUFUS to try to build a USB stick from this ISO which FAILED.

I tried to extract the ISO which also FAILED.

I need exact instructions.

C1Steve

I took the RDOS.BIN file and put it on a USB stick formatted FAT32.

Then to see what happens I tried to boot from this USB stick.

I got a message a single line message sating that RDOS was loading
but nothing else, no other messages at all. I waited 15 minutes.

So now I really need help.

C1Steve

Did you saw a boot menu where you could select RDOS?

In my BIOS I selected to boot from the USB drive containing the RDOS
bin file.

This gives me q one lime message saying RDOS is starting but it does
not continue to boot after that.

Do you have RDOS installed and running?

I have GOOGLED all over for RDOS info but found nothing useful.

C1Steve

I have it installed in a VM. It gets stuck when starting the VGA demo.
Can find more details here: http://www.rdos.net/rdos/index.htm

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Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

I looked at this website but found no helpful information other than
if RDOS is not already installed, installing the first time is hard.


Is there any way to contact this Leif guy for assistance?


C1Steve

I am myself stuck at trying it to boot without the VGA demo in VBox.
Maybe I need to recompile it and generated an RDOS.BIN without the demo at startup.

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Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

Can you do this? Is there any way to contact this LEIF person.
Where did you get the source?

C1Steve

Both source code thorught a SVN repository as well as Leif email address is available in the RDOS website.

- Email: leif AT rdos.net
- Source: http://www.rdos.net/svn/trunk/

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Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

Find uploaded here my Virtual Box disk image: https://wetransfer.com/downloads/650aa7074045d3530...aa657a3dd46b3342fdc8116ac220180130104222/b45857

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Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

> Both source code thorught a SVN repository as well as Leif email address is
> available in the RDOS website.
>
> - Email: leif AT rdos.net
> - Source: http://www.rdos.net/svn/trunk/

Thank you very very much

C1Steve

You are welcome.
Please let me know if any progress.

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Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

Hi, I didn't know RDOS, it's new for me. I read the page and I tried to rebuild it from sources. The process is well described there. I got sources from SVN, installed OpenWatcom under WinXP, run BUILD.BAT and got no errors. Then I build the image from board/core2/MK.BAT that created OS image RDOS.BIN with kernel and necessary modules.
Did you read the Booting RDOS with GRUB bootloader paragraph? I think it's easy way to boot for nonUEFI users. You can use also grub4dos to boot from an existing DOS disk. So I put the files RDOS.BIN and GRUBLOAD.BIN and put lines
title RDOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /grubload.bin
modulenounzip /rdos.bin
to my grub's MENU.LST
but it crashed at boot. I try it on 2 different real PC and under BOCHS but only got the crash screen:

Processor=0000 (0000) No thread
 GDT=FE024FB8 (F047) IDT=FE035030 (07FF) IRQ=00000000
 CR0=80000019 CR2=BFC4FC44 CR3=0000D000 CR4=000000A1
 DR0=00000000 DR1=00000000 DR2=00000000 DR3=00000000
 EAX=BFC4FC44 EBX=00000000 ECX=00000001 EDX=89F88A58
 ESI=00004CCC EDI=00000000 ESP=00000001 EBP=00000792
 EPC=00000030 Double fault
 TR=0178 0000BC00 (000003FF) 32-bit
 DT=0000
 CS=0283 000A0000 (0000FFFF) 16-bit Write
 DS=0020 00000000 (FFFFFFFF) 16-bit Write
 ES=F010 C800E000 (00003FFF) 16-bit Write
 FS=0000
 GS=0000
 SS=F010 C800E000 (00003FFF) 16-bit Write
 US=0020 00000000 (FFFFFFFF) 16-bit Write
NC PO AC ZR PL EI UP OV PR PM  IOPL=0

------------------------------------------------------------

F010:00000001 %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
0283:00000030 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF ˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙˙
0020:00000000 53 FF 00 F0 53 FF 00 F0 53 FF 00 F0 53 FF 00 F0 S˙ đS˙ đS˙ đS˙ đ


Anyway the RDOS is an impressive work I can't belive it was done by single (or few ?) person. The features are cool and match 21th century (multicore, long mode, acpi...) BUT I couldn't read anywhere on the page how it is compatible to existing DOS programs? There's only mention about Emulator for V86 so it may run some realmode programs. As it use multitasking and protection I think that it cannot run many DOS programs. And it's the weakness, all those shiny features against thousands of existing DOS programs. If so it's just another Menuet, tiny Linux, etc. class not a real usable DOS. It would be interesting if it could at least run DPMI programs or if there's some extension for DJGPP to produce RDOS executables. I can see that only OWC has RDOS as host and target.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

I got the same crash also when tried image from ShowVideoModes.zip in BOCHS. Before it crashed I saw shortly a loading RDOS message and I also got APIC write length error by BOCHS that I ignored and clicked continue.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

This is the same I get. I will need to further investigate, and see if I am able to customize the loaded modules.

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Visit my personal blog at https://www.javiergutierrezchamorro.com

> This is the same I get. I will need to further investigate, and see if I am
> able to customize the loaded modules.

I tried to remove some modules from board/core2/rdos.cfg but all the effect was that I got same crash screen or the PC was restarted immediately.
I'm not sure if my compilation process is OK because I found that there are many *.err files containing some warings that was silenced in build.bat I don't know if they are serious, I'm not familiar with OWC. I would need some working RDOS.BIN for a reference that works on real HW or emulator. I don't have virtualbox installed so I used BOCHS...

And can you tell me if RDOS is able to run some DOS programs (COM/EXE RM/PM)?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> This is the same I get. I will need to further investigate, and see if I am
> able to customize the loaded modules.

For info what I would like to do is to get RDOS to boot from HDD

C1Steve

> For info what I would like to do is to get RDOS to boot from HDD

Yes, you can use easily GRUB or GRUB4DOS to boot RDOS from HDD if you have read that paragraph on the site.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

So is there anybody else than author who made RDOS working on real HW or under an emulator?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> So is there anybody else than author who made RDOS working on real HW or
> under an emulator?

I am running a boot manager from TERABYTEUNLIMITED called BOOTITBAREMETAL
and I have been using this for over a decade. BOOTITBAREMETAL supports:

DOS MSDOS FREEDOS without needing a loader because these OS's have
their own loader/

Windows all versions are supported because these OS's don't need another
loader either.

Linux distrubitions for the same readons.

GRUB is a multiboot loader that can run most OSes like Windows, LINUX and many more. You can set up a section in the bootloader to run RDOS. Information about GRUB is here

" After you successfully installed GRUB onto your harddisk,
just add the following lines in a new section in MENU.LST: "

I am not going to remove BBM and try to use grub because, well
it may make RDOS work but I may well get DOS WINDOWS LINUX
difficulties which have been smooth sailing for a decade.

> I am not going to remove BBM and try to use grub because, well
> it may make RDOS work but I may well get DOS WINDOWS LINUX
> difficulties which have been smooth sailing for a decade.

If you have some DOS installed you don't need to install anything else or change your existing bootloader. Just copy GRUB.EXE (from GRUB4DOS package), GRUBLOAD.BIN (RDOS web) and RDOS.BIN to your C: and add to MENU.LST:

title RDOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /grubload.bin
modulenounzip /rdos.bin

and then run GRUB.EXE from DOS.

Unfortunatelly all my trials with RDOS failed with crash or immediare reboot. I tried different OWC compilers, I rebuild RDOS.BIN many times with different driver configuratios but nothing. So I'm asking if somebody else make is successfully running.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

I think I will have time to test On Wednesday.

A question though?

Does this mean that RDOS will be running on top of DOS
with all its inheritant things like 640K?

C1Steve

> Does this mean that RDOS will be running on top of DOS
> with all its inheritant things like 640K?

No, if you use grub4dos boot method it will rewrite DOS in memory and it will be no longer accessible.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.