Going Back to DOS
I’m reinstalling my operating system. I should say systemS, since I’m going to be triple booting. I used to dual boot Linux and Windows 2000, with Linux as primary, until my university presented me with a Microsoft-only interface to their online-eviron. Shortly thereafter, Windows went down, took the hard drive with it, and I didn’t have time (doing a Masters Degree and work simultaneously) to do anything but get Windows back.
That’s the ugliness of Windows. I used to run it *inside* of OS/2 in the old days. I ran Windows software through Wine in Linux. When the primary OS is something other than Windows, and Windows crashes, it doesn’t take you with it. It’s when you’re “in” Windows that the fun occurs.
So I’m going to Ubuntu Linux, and decided that, for similar reasons, I’d never gone back to DOS when I wanted to, and I’m tackling that at the same time. I now have a 500meg DOS partition flying high, and am about to add Windows XP-SP3 and then Ubuntu, and triple boot.
Technie Note: For anyone else who tries this: if you get a message in DOS or DOS FDISK: “no fixed disks present” or else DOS just won’t boot, not even off the floppy - save yourself some time: DOS won’t run if there’s a logical NTFS partition (NTFS in an extended partition) anywhere on any connected hard drive. Turn them into primaries, like I did, or convert them all to FAT32. I spent an entire day figuring this out.
