On-the-fly driver loading

[Stone]

This was mentioned in another thread:

I have a packaged version of DR DOS 5.0 with manuals and all. I haven't loaded it in a good while, but one of the features that I liked was the option to select system drivers in the CONFIG while booting. I believe DR DOS was the first with that feature.

There are several stand-alone programs from the 90s that will load drivers on-the-fly... right from the command line.

Two of which I use regularly are:

XMS/EMS RAM disk which is installable and resizable from command line. This makes very large or small ram disks a snap to create, resize or remove.

LOADSYS.EXE is a TSR and Device Driver loader/unloader, that also functions from the command line. This facilitates the DOS USB flash drive initialization that I always use and the fact it doesn't need to be in the startup files gives it extra value. Plus it can load the other device drivers that are normally loaded on startup if you only need or want them on a part-time basis.

There's others, that I'm not using or familiar with that are likely of interest as well. Maybe they have other features that are worthy of mention.

 

[dieymir]

This was mentioned in another thread:



There are several stand-alone programs from the 90s that will load drivers on-the-fly... right from the command line.

Two of which I use regularly are:

XMS/EMS RAM disk which is installable and resizable from command line. This makes very large or small ram disks a snap to create, resize or remove.

LOADSYS.EXE is a TSR and Device Driver loader/unloader, that also functions from the command line. This facilitates the DOS USB flash drive initialization that I always use and the fact it doesn't need to be in the startup files gives it extra value. Plus it can load the other device drivers that are normally loaded on startup if you only need or want them on a part-time basis.

There's others, that I'm not using or familiar with that are likely of interest as well. Maybe they have other features that are worthy of mention.

I think the OP refers to DR DOS CONFIG.SYS command ?"message"statement. This command shows "message?" at boot and lets you answer Y or N to execute or not the following statement. Actually it was introduced in DR DOS 3.41 albeit in a more limited fashion ?statement (no custom message allowed).

 

[Stone]

You're probably right (since I don't use DR DOS). But didn't that also have the multi-boot option where you can have various startup configurations with different drivers to load via different config.sys menuitem selections in the [menu]? That's the part I'm interested in in this post. I know it's in MS-DOS 6+.

 

[krebizfan]

You're probably right (since I don't use DR DOS). But didn't that also have the multi-boot option where you can have various startup configurations with different drivers to load via different config.sys menuitem selections in the [menu]? That's the part I'm interested in in this post. I know it's in MS-DOS 6+.

The DR-DOS 6 command for multiple configurations is SWITCH. That is perhaps the biggest challenge to using DR-DOS: some commands have different names while others have different options. A manual should be kept handy because of that.