This is a useful facility which will install a Boot facility on a DragonDOS disc. It will work on Dragon DOS V1.0, SuperDOS E6, Superdos V6, Dosplus V4, and Cumana DOS V2 at least, and may be discovered to work with other versions.

Although BOOT is a standard facility, the Dragon manual does not give any explanation on how to achieve it. Several methods have been published in various magazines, however, all contain their own peculiarities and idiosyncracies to specific versions of DragonDOS. Orange Boot overcomes these.

Orange Boot will check that the necessary sector on the disc to accommodate the BOOT facility is not occupied by existing data, so it is possible to install a BOOT sector on an existing disk. This will only check for data that has been stored using standard SAVE or FWRITE commands. Discs that have had data stored on them using the SWRITE command should not be used unless that data is no longer required or the disc is reformatted. A new disc should be formatted with DSKIIMIT before using Orange Boot.

If a disc with Orange Boot is reformatted, the BOOT sector will be deleted. The program will, of course, also check to see if there is an existing BOOT sector on the disc and give you the option to overwrite it with a new version if you want to. It will also protect its own memory sector on the disc to prevent it being overwritten by normal SAVE or FWRITE commands, but it can be destroyed using the SWRITE command, so care should be taken with any program that uses this command. Orange Boot resides on track 0, sector 3 and will only reduce the total disc memory space by 256 bytes.

This may sound very complicated on paper but it is remarkably easy to use, as having done its checks the program will actually tell you that you cannot use the disc if the BOOT sector is occupied by data, when of course you must either move the data to another sector or reformat the disc, and then gives you the option to QUIT or restart with another.

The program also enables you to select one of up to four disc drives which again allows flexibility in use. It asks which file name you wish to BOOT and gives a sharp rebuke if you try not to, together with that familiar Sound 100' that program authors love so much!

Overall a very neat package and well worthwhile.