MS-DOS 6.2 bootable cd

I had a search around and found an article of someone mentioning they got MS-DOS installation on bootable cd.

I am wondering if anyone who has done this to let me know how they manage to do this?

Best burning program is Nero Burning ROM. It specifies two types of bootable CD-ROMs:

1. CD-ROM (Boot)
2. CD-ROM (EFI Boot)

I guess if I have the floppy disks then the boot image data is easy to get. However if I only backed up my MS-DOS 6.2 files of the disks then I won't have the boot image data. If the latter is the case, can Nero still do sometime to make it boot up (like grab the Windows 98SE boot image instead). Then we have unseen problems such as whether MS-DOS setup/install requires data from A:\ drive. Hmm...

Welcome to VirtualDr :)

You can download a program that will recreate a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 3-1/2" floppy diskette (which will then contain your 'boot image data') from bootdisk.com. See this page: http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Okay, I don't need MS-DOS 6.2 anymore since I found out that the best MS-DOS version was in Win98SE. So now am trying to build a MS-DOS 7.0 bootable CD & installation - BUT for games, not generic.

Here's what I found...

In Win98 \WINDOWS\COMMAND\EBD folder contains the Emergency Boot Disk (without the msdos.sys & ebd.sys files for some reason). I extracted the 1.44MB bootable image from the Win98 CD-ROM just to do complete. This is only an Emergency Boot Disk and not tweaked for games. However it's got a good selectable menu system.

In the Win98 \WINDOWS\ there are two files called:

MS-DOS Mode for Games.pif (XMS loading for games)
MS-DOS Mode for Games with EMS and XMS Support.pif (emm386 emulates EMS in XMS)

When double-click either files, they temporarily swap C:\autoexec.bat & C:\config.sys with optimized versions of autoexec.bat & config.sys for games. Why two different pairs of files? Some games were fussy whether emm386 was loaded and other games didn't like it.

So this is a very good idea to embed the differences in the EBD autoexec.bat & config.sys, since there's a choice menu system already programmed in the EBD autoexec & config.

Just needed to copy emm386.exe from C:\WINDOWS\ & also mscdex.exe (from ebd.cab). I also changed RAMDrive to load 16MB (instead of 2MB). Tested CD and it boots perfectly, so user can boot a PC with no harddisk and still run programs that require writing to disk. If the user has a DOS sound card then he can add the drivers to autoexec & config files.


What I want to know is how to install this MS-DOS into a blank C:\ ? Does msdos.sys & io.sys files have to be in the first sector/cluster of the HD? I don't think copying the files directly onto the HD would work?

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by dhruba.bandopad

Why two different pairs of files? Some games were fussy whether emm386 was loaded and other games didn't like it.

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For two different bootup memory configurations:

1. XMS only
   
   
2. XMS with emulated EMS

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dhruba.bandopad

What I want to know is how to install this MS-DOS into a blank C:\ ?

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After creating one or more partitions on the hard drive with FDISK, (and setting the first partition as "A"ctive), format the first partition with the command:

format c: /s

Format's "/s" parameter tells it that you want it to copy the "S"ystem files (to drive C:) when the Formatting is complete. The System bootup files that will be added to drive C: will be:

IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS
COMMAND.COM

You should now be able to boot the system from drive C:.