25 Mar
2014
25 Mar
'14
9:25 a.m.
from "David Quintana (gigaherz)" <gigaherz(a)gmail.com>om>:
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First of all, I'm not an expert when it comes to
what ReactOS supports in
terms of real hardware.
I believe (someone will correct me if I'm wrong),
that ReactOS is not
currently able to boot from USB, and in fact, will fail to boot at all if
an incompatible USB controller (which is most of them, I think?) is
present. Burning a CD-ROM with the setup or livecd images, and possibly
disabling the USB controllers from your bios config, may give you better
results.
I'm assuming that your intention is to try ReactOS
in real hardware,
otherwise it would be better advised to just use VMware, VirtualBox, or
QEMU, as those work mostly out of the box.
Ideally, your real-hardware testing platform should
have a serial port, and
this serial port should be connected to another computer with a serial
port, by using a null-modem cable. This way you could see debug messages
through the serial port, and interact with the remote debugger driver when
(more than if) it crashes.
ReactOS currently only supports FAT32, because
it's a simple driver that
does not need advanced features of the storage system. As the storage stack
improves, it will be possible to attempt using more complex drivers. We
already have an EXT2 driver, but last I heard it was not stable enough to
be able to boot from it.
That's all I know. If it's not enough, maybe
someone with more experience
can add to it.
Thanks for response, but surely one-part plain text would be better than
multipart/alternative?
I could try commands such as drivemap in GRUB 2, but then ReactOS would be lost when
trying to boot.
Would MS-Windows drivers work in ReactOS when running from within VirtualBox or QEMU?
I don't really want to try ReactOS on the same disk with FreeBSD and Linux
installations that I want to keep intact, might be too hazardous.
I don't have any serial ports but have serial headers on motherboard, could
conceivably make a serial port.
FreeDOS can boot from USB stick thanks to recognition by the BIOS/UEFI.
I really would want to install ReactOS to something rewritable; having to burn a new CD
for every little change is too much.
With ReactOS being far from ready for production use, I figure I would have to make
frequent changes/adjustments.
I downloaded the installation iso for ReactOS 0.3.15, burned to CD, but that failed to
boot.
I believe Linux and *BSD are far more flexible in where they can install to than
MS-Windows or OS/2. I hope ReactOS could rise above such Windows booting limitations.
I ran OS/2 from 16-bit 1.3 in 1990 or 1991 to OS/2 Warp 4 in the single-digit days of
April 2001. Then following a crash, on the next boot, CHKDSK, which ran automatically on
the uncleanly-dismounted file system, ran amok and trashed everything on the hard drive.
I was never again able to boot OS/2 after that. Now Linux and FreeBSD capabilities seem
to far surpass OS/2 and its successor eComStation.
Tom