From: Ralph Shumaker
Thomas says (regarding the only way offered to me) that it is very bad and may cause various problems, but does not offer an alternative. What kinds of problems?
The "boot.bat" method is a left-over from ancient days when all that was needed to get the kernel booting was to load it into memory and start executing it. These days, the boot loader has to do more work, e.g. determining the configuration of the PC. Boot.bat doesn't do that and never will.
What alternatives are there?
The best alternative is to install from a (bootable) CD and not from the bin distribution. The second best alternative (if you must use the bin distribution for some reason) is to use a freeldr boot diskette. You can download that from http://reactos.csh-consult.dk/download/freeldr.zip
I would like to see this OS in action. Further, I would like to try to run some DOS and Windows programs, just to find out where ReactOS is, and how far it has left to go.
No use in trying (16-bit) DOS programs, ReactOS doesn't support 16 bit programs at all at the moment.
Gé van Geldorp.