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Third Floppy Drive ? Twenty Six Drives ? (Emulation)

posted by mceric, Germany, 16.07.2021, 20:43

You can have drive letters from A: to Z: in DOS (if you set your LASTDRIVE to Z) but you can only have 2 floppy drives in FreeDOS.

The UDVD2 driver supports up to 4 SATA or IDE CD, DVD or BluRay drives, but our SHSUCDX (similar to MSCDEX) only supports ISO9660 format. DVD or BluRay cannot be used via SHSUCDX if they are formatted with another filesystem.

You can have up to 8 SATA or IDE (PATA) harddisk, SSD or similar fixed disks cached and udma/ultradma accelerated with the UHDD driver, with an arbitrary number of partitions on them. Actually you can have a bit more, but it will depend on how many floppy drives you have and whether you use SATA or PATA etc.

FreeDOS itself supports only MBR style partitions, not GPT style partitions for fixed disks (SSD or harddisk) yet, but Bret Johnson's USB drivers support both already :-) We support FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32, with CHS and LBA style addressing, with disk sizes of up to 2 Terabyte as long as your BIOS supports that. Larger disks would require GPT partitioning or sectors larger than 512 byte, neither of which are supported by the FreeDOS kernel yet. MS DOS 6 is far more limited, but Windows 95/98's MS DOS 7 also supports large disks and partitions, as does EDR-DOS.

No idea how many simulated floppy, harddisk or CD/DVD drives and controllers you can have in VirtualBox. Some very old DOS versions supported up to 4 floppies and had E: as the first harddisk drive letter. FreeDOS is not one of those. You will probably not have UDMA in VirtualBox and because it can use the cache of your host system (Linux, Windows etc.) a DOS cache such as UHDD is less important, but still nice to have.

Note that both UHDD, UDVD2 etc. and DOS itself cache disk contents, so when you tell VirtualBox to virtually insert a different disk, check whether DOS and the DOS drivers properly got notified of the disk change. And do not write to your disk images from Linux or Windows at the same time while VirtualBox is running and using them, because this will probably fail to trigger any content change notifications visible for DOS!

> How many CD-ROMS can I have ?
>
> Hard Drives ?
>
> USB Drives ?

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

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