Booting into DOS

[Jonesey]

Hi All,

I'm trying to run an old game that will only run in a true DOS mode. i.e. not the emulation or Shell that you get by typing "cmd" in the run box.

I think I'm right in saying that DOS will only work on a HDD formatted under the various flavours of FATand NOT NTFS which is what W2K and XP use.

I'm currently running W2K SP4.

Does anyone know a reliable way of booting into DOS.

Cheers,

Colin

[teststrips]

if you are running nt/2000/2003 or xp (which I am assuming you are since you posted in the nt/2000/2003 forum), dos will likely not be able to mount (read) your partitions. Those systems genrerally use a file system called NTFS, while dos uses FAT. Fat was a good file system, but had some major limitations for partition size and security. NTFS offers virutually unlimited partition sizes, and can store security measures for files/folders/and entire drives.

not that that answers your question at all, but I DO have an answer. You can create a DOS bootable Floppy that has your game on it, or if your game is too big, create a bootable CD.

www.bootdisk.com is a good place to start for learning about creating boot disks.

you COULD create a FAT partition on your hard drive, and boot from that, but it would likely be dangerous (you might hurt your system that's working fine) and it can be quite difficult to set-up a boot manager so you can choose windows/vs dos.

[teststrips]

I thought of one other solution... I have a product called VirtualPC that creates a completely virtual pc that runs INSIDE of windows. You could install dos and your game inside, and it would likely work well.

This product isn't cheap though, so a boot CD might be easier (although you wouldn't be able to save your games)

[Jonesey]

Ok, the story so far.

I have 2 HDD's installed in my computer.
1 is the main system dusc containing W2K which I normally boot from.

The second disc is set up as follows.
1 - Active partition formatted as FAT32 (500Mb)
2 - Rest of disc formatted as NTFS

Windows is not installed on either of these partitions, however, when I try to boot from this (I'm disabling the main disc in the BIOS - mainly because I'm paranoid!) I still get the message "NTLDR is missing".
So why is it expecting to find an NT formatted disc.

Also, I have a bootable DOS floopy which can get me to an "A" prompt.
But I can't do much from there. Typing in D: results in "Invalid Drive Specification", typring in C: results in "Drive Not Ready"

I only want to run this game in DOS mode :rox:

The game itself is too big to fit on a floppy so I'm basically back to square one.

Any thoughts or suggestions ayone?

Cheers,

Colin

[teststrips]

[Jonesey]

Ok guys, progress.

Small FAT32 partition now created on spare HDD.
Can boot from floppy into DOS, loaded game & it runs Ok apart from one small problem.
Because no mouse drivers were loaded, mouse doesn't work.
So I've downloaded some mouse software, copied it onto the FAT drive and can enable it from there.
But, when I run my game now it's telling me there's not enough memory available, and that I should do one (or more) of the following:
1 - Disable any TRS software (don't think there is any)
2 - Load DOS as HIGH - how do I do this?
3 - Install an EMS Emulator??????
4 - Install an Upper Memory Block Managaer?????

If I reboot without loading the mouse software this problem disappears.

Any ideas anyone?

Cheer

Colin

[teststrips]

Wow... man I haven't thought about loading dos high, etc for a very long time.

Dos had some major limitations, and DOS by itself could not handle any more than 1 MB of ram. It called the first 640K Conventional memory, and anything above 640K "high memory". The high memory was managed by a driver called HiMem.sys (which is loaded in the config.sys file at boot time)

Once systems with more than 1 meg of RAM were available, additional drivers had to be loaded. In DOS terms any ram memory above 1meg was called "extended memory" and was managed by a driver called Emm386.

You'll want to edit the config.sys file on your floppy to see what is loading. You should see

device=a:\path\himem.sys (path may be diffrent ex c:\himem.sys)
Device=A:\emm386.exe (path may be different)
dos=high,umb

if you wanted to load your mouse driver automatically, you'd put that in the autoexec.bat file. Syntax would probably look something like this

C:\mouse\mouse.com
or to load it in high memory
LH C:\mouse\mouse.com

Some references that helped me rember this stuff. http://www.geocities.com/politalk/dos/memory.htm

And from classic PC games (which is written a little more simply)
http://www.classicpcgames.com/?p=faqdosmemory

Man, I am so glad we don't have to deal with that crap anymore.. windows really makes life easy!!

[icecube]

copy and paste what teststrips has advised--the order is important for your config file.

One thing I would add to the Autoexec.bat file is "C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE" this will speed up anything you are doing in dos tremendously. If you don't have that loaded, you only get to play with 640K