you need the boot command of dosbox coupled with the freedos image. The readme has something on the boot command. Just mounting the freedos folder and changing into it does not mean you are running freedos.

I've found that trying to run FreeDOS inside of DOSBox is pretty useless, as booting in DOSBox causes you to lose access to the DOSBox utilities on the virtual Z:\ drive (including mount, imgmount, etc.).

What can FreeDOS do for you that DOSBox's built-in DOS can't? You can run most of FreeDOS' utilities from DOSBox's built-in DOS without actually booting the FreeDOS kernel.

One reason I got freedos was for debug. Which I can use now. I initially got dosbox for games. Then I installed some software like word perfect.

I had an old Mac and I was running an ms-dos emulator. I have found dosbox great so far. But I guess I was thinking of all the dos programs and commands like mode, pkzip and pkunzip etc.

Are you saying that I can just install these programs and commands into dosbox? Like I can enter debug now and I even did a memory dump.

Another thing I find dosbox to be different than other versions of dos. I am not complaining, like the ability to boot from a floppy. I am just starting out though. And I don't know exactly what I want to do. I did install gw-basic and have been fooling around with that.

Thanks for the replies, and any other thoughts you have on what I have said would be great. I don't want to sound like I am complaining, I am just tryin to figure stuff out.

You can boot from a floppy (at leat I think you can) if it is a dos you try to boot.

I'm not trying to say DOSBox's built-in DOS is better than FreeDOS or anything; I'm just trying to save you the headache that I already went through 😀

Yes, you can use most of those programs you mentioned from inside of DOSBox's bulit-in DOS.

You can boot floppy/CD-ROM/HDD image files in DOSBox using its built-in BOOT command. I don't know if you can boot a real floppy unless you're able to first mount it in dosbox using the MOUNT command, which means it has to be a DOS-readable disk.

Hello
I have some freedos .img files I was going to boot to. When I went to boot to a.img(there is also b.img c.img and bochsrc in the directory where I have my .img files.

It booted and said type install to install freedos, but it asked me if I wanted to partition my drive for freedos. I am wondering if that is something I would want to do? It also said if I partitioned the drive to format it?

I am wondering, I have a Mac running Mac os x. I don't want to mess up my hard drive, the way I have things. Is this something I should do partition my drive. I do like the idea of being able to boot into freedos.

FreeDOS running inside of DOSBox won't have access to any hard drives, let alone your real one. I don't believe it's possible to "install" FreeDOS inside of DOSBox, because what you really want is to install it to a virtual hard drive image file, but DOSBox makes that impossible because you can't have such a file mounted after booting the FreeDOS CD image. This is one of the limitations of DOSBox that comes from it being designed specifically to play games.