[vcf-midatlantic] Project of the day - Windows 3.11 386Enh on a floppy

[Richard Cini]

It *almost* worked with Stacker. You can create a bootable DOS disk and Stac the floppy. When doing “DIR” it says about 2.7MB free, which is great, but YMMV depending on what you put on it because of the varying compression rates for files.

 

In my experiments last night, the Stac volume fit all files EXCEPT win386.exe (which of course is required). Win386 is about 545K in size and all that was free on the Stac volume was about 230K. I tried maximum compression and “optimizing” the volume, but that didn’t help. 

 

The footprint of a basic, clean, install of Windows 3.11 is 6.3MB. I pared it down to 2.5MB (2,403.6K to be exact). The size of the boot files (not the DOS system files) is about 107.4K (pkunzip, HIMEM, CDROM drivers, RAM drive driver, etc.) if using the “unzip to a RAM drive” method rather than Stac. Together, the boot files are 235K (after removing DRVSPACE.BIN), leaving 1.222.6K for a ZIP file. I played around with it again, and I can get 386 Enhanced working using the PKZip method.

 

There isn’t a lot of free space, so it doesn’t do much, but it has 55MB free without virtual memory.

 

 

Rich

 

--

Rich Cini

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini

http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32

 

 

On 9/6/20, 11:47 AM, "John Heritage" <john.heritage at gmail.com> wrote:

 

Very nice!  That's stackering the Win 3.11 boot disk itself?  I am curious how much that compresses..  

 

Also, would that work on a 'modern' PC - such as a Socket 7 system? (of ~ Pentium MMX era/vintage)?   I have a K6-3+ BIOS modded Socket 7 system I use for fun.  (OC'd to 75 MHz bus = 450 MHz).  

 

On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 8:33 PM Richard Cini <rich.cini at gmail.com> wrote:

Ha, just pulled out a copy of Stacker 4.0 and compressed a floppy disk. 2.8MB free. That's a lot of room :-)

Rich

--
Rich Cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32


On 9/5/20, 7:28 PM, "Richard Cini" <rich.cini at gmail.com> wrote:

    Yeah, I thought of that too. I did this within Parallels on my Mac (so, going back and forth between Windows XP and MS-DOS 6.22 running as virtual machines) and Parallels doesn't support DMF (or anything other than 1.44MB). Neither does VirtualBox interestingly. It might be possible to do it on a real PC, but not sure.

    Yes, that extra 200k would make a huge difference in what could be included. Another way, that I haven't dried, is using Doublespace to create a virtual drive on the floppy.

    Rich

    --
    Rich Cini
    http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
    http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32


    On 9/5/20, 7:23 PM, "vcf-midatlantic on behalf of John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic" <vcf-midatlantic-bounces at lists.vcfed.org on behalf of vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

        How about using one of the extended disk formats - 1.68MB or whatever
        format IBM Used for their OS/2 floppies?   or is that not bootable?   (This
        format was at least readable by standard 1.44 MB drives using standard
        1.44MB disks.. )

        Interesting challenge !

        On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 7:20 PM Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic <
        vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

        > Not really sure what applicability this really has, but today’s challenge
        > was to get Windows 3.11 Enhanced Mode running from a single 1.44MB floppy
        > disk. There are easy ways to get Standard mode running, including using
        > files from “precopy.cab” on Windows 95 or 98, but this was way more
        > challenging. I started from a full install and pared it down using a guide
        > I found (which was a two-disk solution).
        >
        >
        >
        > The boot files and required extras (HIMEM, PKUNZIP and a very small
        > ramdrive driver) took about 300K, leaving only about 1.2MB (1.156MB to be
        > exact) for a complete install. A normal no-frills install is about 3-ish
        > megabytes.
        >
        >
        >
        > There are significant compromises – no virtual memory, no networking, no
        > multimedia, only system fonts, and only a few apps, but once running you
        > could run them from another floppy. I discovered that 386Enh won’t put a
        > temporary swapfile on a RAM drive, so it runs without it.
        >
        >
        >
        > I guess you could call this the 1992 version of PortableApps :-)
        >
        >
        >
        > Rich
        >
        >
        >
        > --
        >
        > Rich Cini
        >
        > http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
        >
        > http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
        >
        >
        >
        >
        >
        >