The MS-DOS 5.00 Experiment

[Gaurav S Rao]

Hey Guys, around 5 minutes ago i got to know that you can boot from a vhd,img,iso,etc using EasyBCD,im doing a project in which ive successfully been able to boot MSDOS Version 5.00,now my questing is,can i create a FAT16 Partition on my drive and have DOS 5 Detec it ( I dont want to wipe the drive and even if i could dos cannot used 120 GB)then go to my dos 5 entry of that fdd img i added and do fdisk and all that and do sys c: and have it work?

 

Thanks

[kb5zue]

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to use MSDos after all these years?

 

[Gaurav S Rao]

Just now, kb5zue said:

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to use MSDos after all these years?

 

I'm that kind of guy who like running DOS application's and older Windows Versions,even though im doing it on a c2d (core 2 duo)and a ssd its better to run it on real metal,not emulating it,so the story goes,i created a 2 GB Partition and fdisk in dos 5,6.22 dont seem to recognize the partition,Now in neosmat EasyBCD I want to specify where/what my dos partition is though it says it'll automatically find it,neither i have a choice,secondly specifiying the drive in the advances options doesnt help,i always get into a grub loader which is a command console (just like command.com)so if i can get help it going to be appricieated.

[kb5zue]

Wow, brings back memories of my TRS-80, Model 1, Level 2.  Yea, the one with the 8 inch floppy disk.  UGH........  Or was it the Commodore 128?  Anyway, good luck with your problems there.  Just too far back for me to remember the details.  Sorry.

 

[Gaurav S Rao]

Just now, kb5zue said:

Wow, brings back memories of my TRS-80, Model 1, Level 2.  Yea, the one with the 8 inch floppy disk.  UGH........  Or was it the Commodore 128?  Anyway, good luck with your problems there.  Just too far back for me to remember the details.  Sorry.

 

atleast do you know what the default dos label was,

[kb5zue]

If I remember, msdos dealt with a "master boot record", or MBR.  I'm also thinking that msdos that long ago will not recognize a 2gig partition but I could be wrong, just not sure.  And there was no FAT32 either, just FAT16.  I remember having to do a "low level format", but can't remember if that was before or after running "FDISK".  Didn't FDISK partition the drive, then run the low level format and then run a regular format so that you could use the drive.  Hard drives always started out as Drive C: because both the A and B drive letters were reserved for floppies.  None of this probably helped at all, sorry, just been a  L - O - N - G time ago.  Wouldn't it be easier to open a DOS box/window from within Windows?  Don't think that would work either though.  Tried that few years back with some old games that I had stored in the garage and they just crapped out and didn't do anything.  Good Luck on trying to get this to work.  And thanks for the brain exercise, been quite a while since working with ms-dos.

[Wild Penquin]

As someone doing retro DOS gaming a lot and growing up with games in the MSDOS 6 -> Win98 era, I have a few tips.

 

On a modern system, it makes more sense to run DOS in a VM than to have a real partition for it. I'll try to summarize with these bullet points:

 

• FDISK is the partitioning program for DOS. You do not make a partition and then run FDISK. You make partitions with FDISK, and then run format
• Most likely, your current system can not run on MBR (which is the partition table used until Windows XP, and perhaps a little bit later). All >2TB drives use GPT partitions.
• Windows XP didn't come with a boot manager that could run multiple OSes, so you still would need some way around that (perhaps different HDs and use BIOS boot menu for booting)
• Why run DOS5? DOS 6.XX should be downwards compatible with (mostly anything) you throw at it.
• It might actually make most sense to run DOS 7.XX (which actually means Win9X after WIN95OSR2) makes more sense in that you get FAT32 support
• If you run old games (or other software) for DOS on modern hardware, expect loads of incompatibilities and tweaking!

There are other reasons. I'd just forget about it, unless you really have DOS-era HW and a dedicated machine. A VM would make a lot more sense (though I'm not sure which ones can ran DOS).