How can I install DOS without a floppy drive?
Kulin Remailer
drive? I can burn CDs if necessary but I can't figure out if it's possible
to get 5 installation disks on one CD to be recognized during an install or
if a CD install for DOS is even possible. Any suggestions?
If the PC supports PXE boot does anybody know if you can install DOS over
PXE or how hard it is to setup a PXE server? What are my options for doing
this I guess is my question.
Dave Dunfield
>Is there any way to install DOS on a modern PC or laptop with no floppy
>drive? I can burn CDs if necessary but I can't figure out if it's possible
>to get 5 installation disks on one CD to be recognized during an install or
>if a CD install for DOS is even possible. Any suggestions?
I take it you are trying to install DOS from a set of distribution disks? ...
I haven't done that since about the first time I installed DOS.
You can burn a bootable CD which will emulate a floppy boot, and you
can install DOS from that .. the trick with using distribution diskettes which
want you to change disks is that you can't physically do that. Depending
on the installed, you might be able to install from directories on a CD.
But.. all you need to install DOS is a boot disk with FDISK & FORMAT,
and some way to get the various utilities you use onto the system.
If you have DOS running somewhere else, this is dead easy ... just boot
the system, do FORMAT/S on a floppy to create a bootable disk. Add
the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX (and appropriate CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT files to load them), I'd also make sure FDISK, FORMAT,
XCOPY, a text editor and an UNZIP are on the floppy, although these
could be on the CD if you like (once you boot the floppy, you will be
able to access anything on the CD).
The burn a CD with that boot floppy image, and the rest of the CD filled
with the stuff you want to be able to install - probably at least a DOS
directory with the DOS utilities, and perhaps a BIN or CMDS directory
with all the small 3rd party utilities you like. You can also put directories
with larger packages if you wish. It may be easier for you to put ZIPs
on the CD and just unzip them to the hard drive.
Then, just boot the CD, which will get you to an A:\> DOS prompt ... then
use FDISK to create a DOS partition, and FORMAT/S to format it and
make it bootable. Copy over your CD driver, CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and tweak them as you wish for your hard drive
install (add HIMEM, EMM386 if you wish, RAMDRIVE if you wish etc.)
Use XCOPY to copy over the \DOS and whatever other directories you
wish from the CD (or UNZIP if you saved them as ZIPS).
And thats it - you are basically up and running. Remove the CD and
reboot and you should get up on a hard-drive based system. If you
messed up CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT bad enough that it
won't boot, just boot the CD and go fix it.
Another option is to put the hard drive into a system with a floppy,
then install your distribution floppies to it, and move the drive back.
basic DOS doesn't really care about many details of the system
it's running on (it's requirements are very modest that most any PC
can meet and it doesn't check), so you can move HDs with DOS
on them around pretty easily.
In either case, you will want to make sure that you include software
in the new system to let you easily transfer more files to/from it - see
my recent posting for some ideas.
Dave
--
dave09@ Low-cost firmware development tools: www.dunfield.com
dunfield. Classic computer collection: www.classiccmp.org/dunfield
com
Rod Pemberton
"Kulin Remailer" <rema...@reece.net.au> wrote in message
news:5HYS4UP64057...@reece.net.au...
> Is there any way to install DOS on a modern PC or laptop with no floppy
> drive?
Yes, a modern PC will boot any bootable media that it can locate: floppy,
harddisk, USB stick, USB harddrive, CD-ROM, etc. It's called BBS: BIOS Boot
Spec. The BIOS will emulate a floppy or harddisk if a bootable floppy or
harddisk image is found on a USB device. One DOS boots, you can access the
remainder of your files via some other device, even if they aren't on the
boot device. CD-ROMs and non-bootable USB devices will need DOS device
drivers.
One method is a bootable harddisk which was formated, partitioned, and had
DOS installed, when it was in another computer. I.e., you setup DOS on one
computer harddisk and pull the drive and use it in the new machine.
Another method is a bootable CD-ROM.
To see the BBS boot menu, you may need to enable the normal boot sequence in
BIOS. I.e., not fast, not quick, etc. This displays the POST, memory
check, auto-detected devices, etc followed by another status screen showing
DMA, IRQ's, ACPI, etc. Once that's enabled, you should be able to press a
key, like F11, to pull up the BBS boot menu during the *first* screen.
Then, you can select the drive to boot from. Alternately, you can set the
BIOS to just boot that device. So, all you need do is copy an image of a
DOS boot disk to a USB stick, and you should be able to boot it. Sometimes
requires special software. From there, you'll need to FDISK, FORMAT, and
SYS your harddisk. If the boot image has MSCDEX and your CD-ROM drivers,
you can copy them over, setup the correct lines in CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT and you'll have access to a CD-ROM, e.g., will the rest of DOS
on it.
> I can burn CDs if necessary but I can't figure out if it's possible
> to get 5 installation disks on one CD to be recognized during an install
or
> if a CD install for DOS is even possible. Any suggestions?
>
You should only need a few files on a bootable DOS image to boot DOS.
msdos.sys
io.sys
command.com
; these three are installed by SYS command
sys.com
format.com
fdisk.exe
mscdex.exe
attrib.exe
-and maybe a CD-ROM driver ...
config.sys
autoexec.bat
; these will have standard DOS commands to run mscdex and your CD-ROM
driver, if needed
Then, you can copy the remainder of files off of another device: harddisk,
floppy, cdrom, usb stick, usb harddisk, etc.
You should be able to locate decent boot disk images on the 'net if you
don't have any. They'll probably be FreeDOS, but you might find DR-DOS. In
dark corners, you may even find MS-DOS or PC-DOS...
Rod Pemberton
Kulin Remailer
Thanks for your posts. I'm missing something here.
I created a zip file of an installed DOS system and got it onto my Linux
host. My plan was to try to boot a DOS boot disk and follow your
instructions to format a partition I already have created, but for some
reason the boot disk only recognized my A: drive. I got the abort/retry/fail
prompt when I tried to dir c: or dir d: etc.
I was going to use one of my swap partitions as a home for a real DOS since
it's 2G. Using Linux fdisk I changed the partition id to 06 hoping DOS would
recognize it.
But when I boot the DOS boot disk I can't get DOS fdisk to run, it says C:
drive isn't accessible. If I could format/s the partition I was planning to
just go back to my Linux box and unzip the installed DOS over the filesystem
hopefully giving me a real bootable DOS. But the DOS bootdisk doesn't see
the drive. I wonder if this is because I have partition types that weren't
known to DOS.
I am trying to find a tool that lets me install a bootloader in a FAT
partition from Linux, that would solve the problem, because I can get the
system over there, but I haven't found anything yet. I just can't get it
bootable.
I am afraid to try a more modern bootdisk (XP for example) since XP has a
tendency to try to own the PC and feels free to write on the disk without
asking. I don't want to lose my Linux.
Do you have any idea what could be wrong, why doesn't DOS6.22 see the hard
drive? Thank you.
Dave Dunfield
>Hi Dave and Rod,
Do you have anything odd or excessively modern in your hard drive setup?
DOS needs to access the drive via BIOS.
I still use DOS 5 for most of my DOS systems, but I believe 6.22 has similar
limitations:
DOS 5 doesn't support FAT32 and won't support a partition larger than
slightly under 2G ... And it accesses the drive through C,H,S addressing,
which can't support a cylinder larger than 1024.
For many systems, the combination of FAT16 and CHS addressing results in
a maximum usable partition size of just under 512M (Depends on how your
BIOS translates larger drives to this interface). I believe it is possible to
get DOS to work in LBA ... but I've never bothered to figure it out as 512M
is lots big for anything I do under DOS.
And to make matters worse, the partition offset has to be within the 1024
cylinder boundary from the start of the drive.
So - when multi-booting older DOS it's best to make the DOS partition
first on the drive, and small.
"newer" DOS such as MS-DOS 7 (the DOS under Win9x), PCDOS-7,
OpenDOS-7 etc. know how to talk to larger drives may not be so
restrictive.
Dave
--
dave10@ Low-cost firmware development tools: www.dunfield.com
Kulin Remailer
I don't think so, but...
> DOS 5 doesn't support FAT32 and won't support a partition larger than
> slightly under 2G ... And it accesses the drive through C,H,S addressing,
> which can't support a cylinder larger than 1024.
I'm really not sure how I set up my emulated DOS except for DRDOS 7.03 is
happy with a 2 gig drive and calls it FAT16B > 32M. I *thought* I gave my
MSDOS 6.22 system 2G also but fdisk on it only shows me 1G.
> For many systems, the combination of FAT16 and CHS addressing results in
> a maximum usable partition size of just under 512M (Depends on how your
> BIOS translates larger drives to this interface). I believe it is possible
> to get DOS to work in LBA ... but I've never bothered to figure it out as
> 512M is lots big for anything I do under DOS.
> And to make matters worse, the partition offset has to be within the 1024
> cylinder boundary from the start of the drive.
I am starting to remember this now. My real DOS partition that I stole from
my Linux swap is 2G and that's how big I built the filesystem...and DRDOS
and 98SE boot disks can read it fine and so can FreeDOS. But...it's more
than 1024 into the drive which from your explanation I am wondering if this
is why fdisk on the real drive either fails or on DRDOS 7.03 gives me a
weird partition table that I am afraid to touch. Format failed also, did
nothing. I was able to exec my autoexec.bat and my system was ok, I just
can't get the darn thing bootable. It is probably related to what you are
saying and at this point I have no way to get it on a real box because I'm
out of space other than my swap files which start about 6-10G into the
drive.
> So - when multi-booting older DOS it's best to make the DOS partition
> first on the drive, and small.
Yeah thanks. I had in mind to create 3 2G partitions so I could install
several DOS but that may not even be possible. I wonder if jacking up the
numbers so the cylinders are bigger will help or if the limitation is not
just on cylinders.
I thought 512M would be plenty too but after I installed only a few DJGPP
zips and OpenWatcom it was already getting pretty full so I figured I would
go for the biggest DRDOS would tolerate which seems to be 2G. I'll have to
plan a little more carefully when I learn the limits of each DOS version.
> "newer" DOS such as MS-DOS 7 (the DOS under Win9x), PCDOS-7,
> OpenDOS-7 etc. know how to talk to larger drives may not be so
> restrictive.
Yes, it does seem to work better and even run after I booted into it with a
boot CD and did my autoexec bat after switching to C:. But I didn't check
to see if MASM/PWB would crash it yet.
I may look into creating my own boot disk with the full DRDOS install using
some tools I found on the net. That seems to be the only hope for installing
on my present setup but because of the CHS stuff that may not work either.
It will be a little while until I get my old box fixed up. Bummer for me!
Thanks guys.
pe...@nospam.demon.co.uk
rema...@reece.net.au "Kulin Remailer" writes:
Here's an extract from an article around 15 years ago:
| The capabilities of DOS are constrained by a combination of the IDE spec & the
| BIOS. The IDE spec allows for hard disk sizes of up to 130GB, whilst a
| "standard" (non-LBA) PC BIOS can handle disks of up to 8GB in size. The 504MB
| "limit" occurs because of a mismatch between the drive geometries supported by
| each hardware standard. The problem is that DOS uses the "lowest common
| denominator". ie -
|
| BIOS IDE DOS
| Max sectors/track 63 255 63
| Max Heads 255 16 16
| Max Cylinders 1024 65536 1024
|
| To calculate sizes from Sectors, etc, use the following formula :
|
| sectors x heads x cylinders x 512 = capacity in *bytes*. To convert to MB divide
| your answer by 1,048,576.
|
| This gives : BIOS limit = 8,032.5MB; IDE limit = 130,560MB; DOS limit = 504MB
|
| MS-DOS 6.x does *not* support drives up to 2GB natively, unless your BIOS has an
| LBA mode available. It supports *partitions* (important distinction) of up to
| 2GB. Why you'd want a 2GB FAT partition is beyond me, as you'd lose about 300MB
| (ballpark figure) due to "slack" space.
The original message-id is <610520...@naismith.demon.co.uk> but I
have no idea whether it is still available or not. Some follow-ups
(again if they are still available) might be informative:
<610520...@naismith.demon.co.uk>
<VRz$dDAIGY...@hoskin.demon.co.uk>
In short, DOS can handle up to 2GB; beyond that, you're on your owm
(though of course things might well have changed in the intervening 15
years).
Pete
--
"We have not inherited the earth from our ancestors,
we have borrowed it from our descendants."
ken.le...@gmail.com
There is a file on the first diskette called "setup.ini", i have edited this to take out the references to the diskettes as this is where it tells you to insert disk 2 ect.
Crating the bootable cd on nero is easy you just need to get the dos boot disc image (bootdisc.com). this puts about 18 files on the cd, inset it into the pc you want to install dos onto boot up and type sys c:\ that will transfer the boot files to the hard drive and will boot up from the hard drive then.
That bit is easy........the hard bit it getting the rest of the install files on to the hard drive. I have tried copying all the dos files to the cd first telling nero not to close the disk, i then made the cd bootable as described above. Trouble is when you boot from the cd not all the files are shown on the pc you installing dos onto. You really need a cd driver installed to allow access to the cd after booting, it's a catch 22 situation you can get the cd driver onto the pc as you need dos there to accept it.
I will try what somebody suggested earlier in this post and make a directory this may be visable after booting
Benjamin David Lunt
<ken.le...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:b6cbd074-71df-4df0...@googlegroups.com...
I usually visit this group but I don't think I have posted anything
in some time.
Anyway, the thought that came to my mind would be to use an emulator
such as Bochs (http://bochs.sourceforge.net/).
You say you can burn CD's, so this tells me you have another PC
with some sort of OS installed.
Since DOS can only see so many megs of disk space and a normal CD
will only hold around 700meg, I would create a virtual disk of
about 700meg on my working PC. Install Bochs, and use its floppy
emulation to install DOS onto the virtual disk using all of the
floppies, one at a time.
Once you have DOS installed as you wish, then burn that image to
the CD, along with a utility that will write the image from the
CD to the physical sectors of the hard drive.
Once you have done this, you are done.
This does require that you have Bochs (or another emulator) installed,
a file image of each floppy, (disk0.img, disk1.img, disk2.img, ...),
a 700meg virtual disk image (hdd.img), a bootable CDROM with FreeDOS
or other OS, and a utility to read the 700Meg image from the CD and
write it to the hard drive, a sector at a time. (Bochs will read
directly from your floppy drive as the emulated floppy drive, so no
need for images, as long as you have a Win9x/NT family of Windows
installed.)
Speaking of FreeDOS, if you are not set on one brand of DOS,
FreeDOS has a bootable CD image that will install itself directly
to the hard drive. FreeDOS is very similar to (MS)DOS with little
or no difference noticed by the applications executed upon it.
http://www.freedos.org/
Anyway, just my two bits, cents, whatever. Hope this helps.
Ben
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Wildman
> > Is there any way to install DOS on a modern PC or laptop with no
> > floppy drive? I can burn CDs if necessary but I can't figure out if
> > it's possible to get 5 installation disks on one CD to be
> > recognized during an install or if a CD install for DOS is even
> > possible. Any suggestions?
> >
> > If the PC supports PXE boot does anybody know if you can install
> > DOS over PXE or how hard it is to setup a PXE server? What are my
> > options for doing this I guess is my question.
the dos you want to use. With 5 disks maybe PC-Dos 7. So I do
not know if this will work. Anyway, here is what I did...
First I created a bootable floppy image that loads my CD-Rom
driver, himem, emm386 and smartdrv. They all must be loaded
or this will not work at all. Next, I created a bootable CD
using that floppy image and I copied all the dos files to a
directory on the CD.
Boot with the CD. Change to the CD-Rom drive. Change to the
directory where the dos files are located and run setup. The
installation will be as though it was installed from floppies.
Can't help with the PXE question.
--
<Wildman> GNU/Linux user #557453
The cow died so I don't need your bull!
R.Wieser
As the post you're replying to seems to be over three-and-a-half *years* old
I don't think Kulin is still waiting for an answer ...
> I have tried copying all the dos files to the cd first telling nero not to
Modern CD-rom drives can probably handle those non-closed CDs, but do not
bet on it. Any reason why you're not closing the CD ?
> Trouble is when you boot from the cd not all the files are shown on
> the pc you installing dos onto.
closed, it could also be that you've choosen the wrong type of filesystem
name storage. The one you need to use is the ISO-9660 file-system naming
convention (the strictest one, DOS 8.3 filename compatible).
> I will try what somebody suggested earlier in this post and make
> a directory this may be visable after booting
newsgroups, as on them messages older than a few weeks (sometimes even days)
get removed. Only Google is known to hold on to them *much* longer
(indefinatily ?). Nice for look-up purposes, but why the heck does it
allow, without as much as a warning, to reply to posts this old. :-\
Regards,
Rudy Wieser
-- Origional message:
<ken.le...@gmail.com> schreef in berichtnieuws
b6cbd074-71df-4df0...@googlegroups.com...
Wildman
"R.Wieser" <add...@not.available> wrote:
> Ken,
>
> As the post you're replying to seems to be over three-and-a-half
> *years* old I don't think Kulin is still waiting for an answer ...
<bowing head in shame>
adsour...@gmail.com
Trifle Menot
>> > As the post you're replying to seems to be over three-and-a-half
>> > *years* old I don't think Kulin is still waiting for an answer ...
>necessary for my one man band that works only on older OS - Millennium,
>so these "ancient" posts are a Godsend!!
does 30 years make? If you've been traveling at 99.9999% the speed of
light, it's still 1987.