Bringing up the subject of a DOS operating system is a subject that I had thought would have died years ago. Never-the-less I have a need at my place of employment to set up a system that consists of both a DOS and Win2k system.
I have partitioned drive C with a small, 40 meg, partition that I am using for DOS. In front of that 40 meg partition is the Win2k partition, which takes up the balance of a 40gig drive.
The Win2k system is working just fine. However, I haven’t been able to view the DOS partition from a floppy disk boot using DOS 6.22. I have formatted the DOS partition with a FAT format and it’s working fine when I view it from a Win2k boot. But when I boot from a DOS 6.22 floppy disk the DOS partition isn’t accessable.
I’m missing something, but I haven’t been able to see the forest for the trees.
You can use QEMU which is also free (as in the free liked by Linux dudes). It is easier to use than Bochs I hear. http://free.oszoo.org/download.html will give you a windows installer for it. You should also download QEMU accelerator, which is free as in beer. The advantage of this is that it will be easy to setup MS DOS in this.
VMWare is the best of the lot, but you have to pay. VMWare player is free, but for that you need to possess an already created VM image. You might find one for freedos, but not for MS DOS.
OR, if you run a server version of Win2K, you can download the free (as in beer) VMWare server beta, and then that allows you to create virtual machine as well.
Perhaps if you download a trial edition of VMWare workstation (30 days), the VM images will still run in VMPlayer after trial expiry, but I am not sure of that.
Sorry if I didn’t explain myself and thanks for the many responses.
In response to the individual who suggested using a DOS emulator - I can’t.
The issue here is that I’m doing this for a test system at my work. The system has software that is written specifically for a pure version of DOS. This is because the system software reads from 3.5" disks that are formatted with a non-IBM format. Long story - I must do this using DOS.
Booting from a DOS floppy was easier to do than trying to configure things to boot from the boot.ini - however, I have a bootable system on the DOS drive, which is drive “D:”. If someone can help me modify the boot.ini file so I have a choice of which system to boot to, this might resolve this issue.
If your dos is bootable, what did you install first dos or win2k, here are two scenarios :
[ol]
[li]If you installed dos first followd by win2k then you should have automatically got both dos and win2k in OS choice menu.[/li][li]If you installed win2k first followed by dos then you would not get a OS choice menu, in that case you would not be able to log onto win2k, for that you have to run the win2k repair disk to get both the win2k and dos in OS choice menu.[/li][/ol]
So basically my question is are you installing a Standalone/bootable dos like version 6.22 and what file format you are using Fat16 or Fat32.
And I think if you use a VMware product, there should be no problem even with a pure version of DOS, and non standard formats. Try it out and see. Download VMWare workstation trial and try. Can’t hurt.
The reason it should work is that the drive reading is done by the virtual machine. In fact, the hardware drive is connected directly to the virtual machine.
In response to your questions;
I installed win2k first and it’s on drive “C”, which is a 40 gig with NTSF format.
On drive “D” is the DOS, which is formatted as FAT (not FAT32).
Presently I have a 3.5" floppy with a bootable DOS on it. I can use that floppy to boot with then go into the DOS hard-drive. That works just fine. It would be nice if I could modify the boot.ini to give me a choice, but if I have to purchase something extra, I can just stay with the floppy.
I don’t use the DOS very often - probably only once-a-day, sometimes less, so it isn’t something I’ll be going into very often.
The boot.ini only has the win2k in it at this time. Can I add another line to give me a choice of OS?
What Dos is this, see my point is if its bootable dos like dos 6.22 then you would have got a boot sector written for it, only then can you get a OS choice menu and that too by repairing the win2k bootsector using win2k repair disk utility.
You just cant add a line to boot.ini to get a os choice menu for dos, the dos must be bootable, thats why the version you have installed on D: is important.
I appreciate everyone’s responses. It would appear that the simplest method of doing what I need to do is to stick with the DOS floppy for the boot. Like I said, it isn’t something I expect to do very often and the floppy DOES work at present.
