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Lastdrive setting - Novell NETX logon

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First post, by JadedMeerkat

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Hi @ all,

I'm very new here, so as you might guess I've run into my first problem with DosBox which can't be solved firsthand, or by Google (unfortunately).

I'm attempting to use the patched 'Mega build' from HAL9000 to connect to my Novell domain at work. Yes, I know, but it's not technically a patch-related problem.
I already have a solution which uses Virtual PC 2004 and FreeDOS, but VPC requires an install on all client machines... this is a pain. I've used DOSBox at home for years to play old games, well, the ones my RiscPC daughtercard is too slow to handle - and thought it's a single executable - ideal!

Problem is I'm failing right at the end - connected, authenticated... but there aren't any system drives left for network mappings! Thus resulting in a nasty crash.

Essentially I need access to the LASTDRIVE environment variable as per Novell's documentation, but have a sneaking suspicion this is prevented by DosBox having Z: hard-coded as the startup drive.

Is there a way around this? I've found this guy using it, but to me that seems an unnecessary step since lastdrive is probably Z by default anyway...

Any advice appreciated, and congrats on a great product regardless 😀

Reply 1 of 4, by Qbix

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try a booted msdos inside dosbox.
we don't emulate drives up to a level where lastdrive really matters.

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Reply 2 of 4, by MiniMax

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Maybe you can boot FreeDOS inside DOSBox? I don't know if that is supposed to work.

DOSBox 60 seconds guide | How to ask questions
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Reply 3 of 4, by JadedMeerkat

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Qbix wrote:

try a booted msdos inside dosbox.
we don't emulate drives up to a level where lastdrive really matters.

Thanks - to be honest I'd no idea DosBox would act as a standalone x86 emulator, with disc boot support and all...

After some digging & disc image-related headaches, I found a solution. Windows users of DosBox could check out the shareware app WinImage allows for direct creation, editing and conversion of .img files. Might be an idea to put it in the wiki since I stumbled across it from a blog post by VPC guy, when Disk Explorer failed. Seems to make images whose geometries DosBox can auto-detect, which was fortunate.

Essentially since I had a working setup using of Dos 6.22 under Virtual PC, I mounted the VPC2004 (freeware) .vhd file with WinImage, and used the 'Export to an image with MBR' option under the 'Image' menu.

A few tweaks of autoexec and config later, a standalone emulator talking to Novell 😀

@MiniMax:

Yep, FreeDOS does also work, as I that was my OS of choice. Turns out the DBase App we're running doesn't support it though, so I had to downgrade to MS-DOS!!

Reply 4 of 4, by Qbix

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glad to hear it worked.
DOSBox comes with its own dos, but that one can be replaced with the boot command. This makes testing things much easier and we as devs can run linux /bsd in it as well for extra hardware emulation testing. Futher there are a certain types of games that didn't run on dos, but are intended to be booted.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

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