4DOS

[Kerry Hoath]

This actually is not really the best way to go about this for a couple of 
reasons.
Firstly there is no write ability on a cd; so you can't read the spinrite 
log when finished.
secondly jaws4dos is a bit big for a boot disk, better look at something 
like provox or asap if you have them.
If you can make a spinrite floppy it can be modified to have some speech 
although the working displays won't talk at all.
You make the boot floppy with normal dos, and fire off your screen reader in 
dos. you then execute a command like the folowing:
spinrite drive 0 level 3 auto exit

this will scan and fix the hard drive; logging if possible and exiting to 
dos when done.

spinrite is an excellent bit of gear however know that it can not lowlevel 
format newer ide hard disks even if it wanted to; and although you might get 
your data back; if the number of reallocated sectors is bigger than 10 or so 
time to image what you got back onto a new drive.
Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Beth Hatch" <bhatch200 at comcast.net>
To: "'Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.'" 
<speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 1:45 AM
Subject: RE: 4DOS


> Hello John and all,
>
> I'm just wondering.......  I have a version of the Spin Rite hard drive
> maintenance utility which boots as a CD using Free Dos.  It should be
> theoretically possible to make a bootable spin rite cd using JAWS and Free
> Dos then.  I unfortunately don't have a Double talk, but I do have a 
> Dectalk
> Express.  I tried to install JAWS on a bootable cd, but I got into trouble
> somehow and though I found the floppy images that I downloaded from 
> Freedom
> Scientific, I wasn't able to get them installed on to a CD.  I have a 
> badly
> broken desktop pc that needs Spin Rite very badly to fix the hard drive, 
> it
> would be really cool if I could use JAWS and Free Dos to make this work.
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Beth
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca 
> [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
> On Behalf Of John G. Heim
> Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 9:40 AM
> To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
> Subject: Re: 4DOS
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Gaijin" <gaijin at clearwire.net>
> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." 
> <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
>>
>> Think it would be nice to collect all this old stuff and put it on a
>> CD or DVD iso image.  I wonder what some of these defunct companies
>> would say if we asked them to release the old, no longer supported
>> source code to the GPL.  I miss the old WordStar Professional word
>> processor.
>>
>
> By and large they'd say no.  I've seen it tried many times and mostly you
> get no answer or a refusal. I think these people still have lawyers 
> telling
> them it's a bad idea. Maybe they have something to hide within their 
> code --
> like that it wasn't entirely their own in the first place.
>
> Anyway, I don't know anything about 4dos but the FreeDOS project is alive
> and well. Their mailing list is very active (google it). Anyone interested
> in DOS applications should definately check out FreeDOS. For instance, I
> know that Jaws for DOS; which is a free download on the Freedom Scientific
> web site; runs under FreeDOS.
>
> I have a diskette image on my web site that allows you to boot freeDOS 
> with
> jaws for DOS. It's configured to start talking with an external doubletalk
> hardware synth. In other words, if you have a doubletalk, you can boot 
> from
> this diskette and get speech. See:
>
> http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jheim/blindi/FreeDOS-ltlk.img
>
> The diskette image also includes CD-ROM support. So, theoretically, you 
> can
> boot from a diskette made with this image and then access a CD-ROM. I was
> hoping to install Windows this way. But the Windows installer craps out 
> when
> run under FreeDOS. However, you should be able to make a bootable CD-ROM
> with this image.
>
>
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