I know that DOS stands for disk operating system, but is there a way to run dos as my operating system temporarily? I mean, the computer I'm using (not this one, my computer) doesn't have a big enough hard drive to install windows again (I even fooled with the partitions, but no dice) and the one disk linux system I tried to install was like, corrupted.

So, is there a way to have a computer that will just boot up and run dos? And if so, do you guys know how to configure that? I mean, all I want to do is run simple dos games, like the old Duke Nukem and other Apogee titles.

Google for and download a DOS boot disk.

If you have CD or DVD drive just get Knoppix. Its a lot better and is actually a real OS

I think it is possible to buy dos from MS or their resellers but I haven't seen it on sale myself.

Bootdisk.com?

(Edited: I read about Partition Logic, comes in a LiveCD or floppy that boots Visopsys, maybe you can risk it).

There was a good boot disk that you could even install in the HDD called Super MS-DOS, I will go search for a link of it...

EDIT: Here!

FREE-DOS just run
format c: /s
and it should run

only if you want to lose your data do you run format c:

You have no sense of humour, BAF

I have seen it... $200
[edit]
You can find it for free, look for abandonware in a search engine and dig around.
[/edit]

I've done what your tring to do. I put msdos on a 20gig hd with 512megs of ram.
It can only read a little bit of the ram and has errors with emm386 unless you configure it to just use 32megs/16megs. Also it can't read the entire hard-drive. But It installed just fine. I was running things like privateer and
dune2.
You will need to get a mouse driver, get the mouse driver called cutemouse. If you have a soundblaster live then your'll need to get creative's emulator. I used the emulator with my audigy2 gamer board, but it has some major problems.
You will also have to be able to install things with the cdrom. You need to get someting like oakcdrom.sys. Which you can get from a windows98/95 boot disk.

here is a config.sys (be carful probably full of typeos)

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS                                                       DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM                                                  
BUFFERS=15,0                                                                  
                                               DOS=UMB                                                                       
LASTDRIVE=E                                                                   
FCBS=4,0                                                                      
DEVICEHIGH /L:1,12048 =C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE                                      
DEVICEHIGH=c:\oakcdrom.sys /d:cdromone                                        
DOS=HIGH                                                                      
FILES=40

This is what my config.sys is in my bochs emulator.

AUTOEXEC.BAT

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6                                             
C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X
loadhigh c:\dos\mscdex /d:cdromone /l:e                                       
loadhigh c:\cm\ctmouse.exe
@ECHO OFF                                                                     
PROMPT $p$g                                                                   
PATH C:\DOS                                                                   
SET TEMP=C:\DOS

Thats what my configured stuff looks like in my bochs emulator.

You blaster would be different.
And you need to configure emm386.exe RAM
to just use 16/32 megs of ram(you'll get distorted sound with privateer if you don't).
I forgot how to configure it, but you could find something on the net I'm sure.

[edit2]
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1
you could just try using that.
if it doesn't work try a pc emulator.
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

[edit3]
I googled and found something that might work for emm386.
devicehigh= c:\dos\emm386.exe RAM 32000000
try that. seems like the real thing was different though?:-/

Well, the computer has 16k Ram, so it's not like I'm overclocking DOS. I'll just get a dos bootdisk for the moment until I get some more Ram and a bigger hd (mine is like, 2 gigs)

Then I'll install either Gentoo or Ubuntu.

I'm guessing you mean 16mb of RAM... which is quite a lot for the vast majority of DOS apps

16 k of RAM ?
I hope you mean 16 MB...

Heh, yeah, still, it's not enough to install Red Hat.

Oh well, I think I got things under control.

Thanks!

You didn't say which version of Windows you're running? Anyway, I doubt FreeDos would run on NT/Win2000/XP. If you're not using HPFS (sp? the high performance file system) a boot disk might work. I got W98, and edited MSDOS.SYS (it's a text file on win9x) to BOOTGUI=0, BOOTMULTI=0 and entered a new line LOGO=0 so I can see the device drivers load instead of looking at whatever LOGO.SYS (a bmp file) has in it (usually clouds)

I tried the Freedos thing myself, it worked so-so, crashed occasionally. It could read all of drive D: which MSDOS 7.1 chokes on in actual dos. You don't have to reformat your drive, it can install a boot loader which can coexist with GRUB at least.

However, I also like to copy all my files from windows to linux partition occasionally, then dd the windows partitions with a few megs of zeros, and reinstall windows, then copy my programming & info stuff back. Linux couldn't grok the FreeDos thing and I had some probs doing the above.

[EDIT]

I forgot there's a third party program available for free somewhere on the web called DOSBOX, I've seen lots of gaming sites that imply this works well for old dos games on XP.

I think that you can use format in FreeDOS like "format a:"
and put some necessary files (don't kill the kernel, you'll need it).
This is my setting:

[FDCONFIG.SYS](CONFIG.SYS)
FILES=40
BREAK=OFF
LASTDRIVE=Z
BUFFERS=20,0
FCBS=40
STACKS=0,0
DOS=HIGH,UMB
VERSION=6.20
DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\HIMEM.EXE
DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\TDSK.EXE 16384 512 144 1
DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\ATAPICDD.SYS /D:CDROM001
DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\CDRCACHE.SYS CDROM001 CDRCACH$ 32
DEVICE=C:\FDOS\BIN\NANSI.SYS /S
SHELL=C:\FDOS\COMMAND.COM C:\FDOS/E:2048 /P=C:\FDOS\FDAUTO.BAT

[FDAUTO.BAT](AUTOEXEC.BAT)
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\DJGPP\BIN;C:\FDOS\BIN;C:\TOOLS;C:\SETEDIT\BIN
SET DJGPP=C:\DJGPP\DJGPP.ENV
SET HELPPATH=C:\FDOS\HELP
SET LANG=US
SET NLSPATH=C:\FDOS\NLS
LBACACHE BUF 8192 FLOP
TICKLE
SHSUCDX /D:CDRCACH$
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330
MOUSE
ECHO WELCOME TO FREEDOS

TDSK is for ramdisk (N/1024)
ATAPICCD and SHSUCDX are for CD-ROM,
CDRCACHE is for CD-ROM cache (N/4)
LABCACHE is for harddisk cache (N/1024), TICKLE is for floopy cache
MOUSE or CTMOUSE is for mouse (include wheel mouse)
also you can put EDIT, XCOPY, DELTREE,ZIP, UNZIP32 etc.
I hope these could help you.

Indeed, 16mb RAM is too little for most Linux distros. You may be able to use DSL (though it requires 64mb I think).

I tried DSL, but it didn't work.

And when I say tried, I mean I looked at the requirements and laughed.

Hmm... Try DragonLinux, Slackzip or CDLinux. Dragonlinux may work, it runs on top of DOS, same as Slackzip.

I had BasicLinux working on a 16MB machine. Don't expect to get X working very well, if at all, with that, though. Maybe if you have a good swap partition..

There is a Floppy distribution, with X interface, but it works. Dragonlinux should work fine enough, and you can download a version with and without X.

(Edited: here is a screenshot of the floppy distro. That whole thread may be useful for you).

Why don't you just use Windows 95 or 98? I had Windows 95 installed on a computer with a 816mb harddrive, with only 8 mb RAM. It only takes 100 or 200mb I think, if even that. Seems like you'd have plenty of space for either. I would probably recommend Windows 95, actually...I liked it a lot better than 98.

Plus, you get all the benefits of DOS there too...should be no problem to play old DOS games. I used to do it all the time until I got a "new" computer.

I tried installing windows 95, but it says I don't have enough space. I'll try either getting a dos boot disk or a smaller linux distro.

http://www.bootdisk.com/

very good source.

So I was wondering:

I got dos working, so that I can run games off of a disk.

Unfortunately, this is really slow and doesn't work as well as I'd like it to.

Is there any way to access the C Drive? When I try to access it, it tells me there's an invalid drive specification. I redid the partition, activated it, and everything. Still, no access to the C drive. I want to know because if it's possible, I'd love to have gcc on there so I could use like, Edit.com to write cpp files and compile them..

Any way to do this?

I'm afraid dos only works with dos partitioned and formatted drives. But other OS'es can read dos drives

Well when I created the partition, the option that I chose was "create logical DOS partition" and that was the correct choice.

Still, I can't seem to get into the C drive.

Next you have to reboot, then you can format the partition.

C: is bootable, so it needs to be a primary partition. Logical partitions are just a way of dividing a single primary partition into several smaller partitions.

Windows 95 has problems on AMD processors faster than 350Mhz, I'd like to go back to 95 myself but get so tired of rebooting 10 times trying to get Winduhs up. "IOS error: System halted" etc.

Okay, here's the current problem.

I managed to get the C: Drive to work, and I can access it, but it's buggy. Whenever I try to put something there, or even do a /dir to find out what's there, it tells me that some sort of like "insecure media type accessing. Abort retry fail."

So I figured "Hey, I got the C: Drive working, why not install windows? Well, I tried. I put the primary dos partition there, used my emergency boot disk, and tried instaling Windows 95. It performs the routine system check, and then tells me "Windows needs 7000000 bytes to install"

That's 7 megabytes, right? Well, it has to be, if I did the math right.

Now, when I created the partition, I set it so that it would take up 100% (Which is about 1 gig and a few megs). Does this mean that there's no room for anything on my C: drive?

Well, I tested that. I created a partition that left about 10 Mb free so that it would have space to install. No dice, it still says it needs 7mb.

This time, I set the partition to take up 10 mb (you'll notice I'm giving windows some lee-way here.)

Still no dice, it keeps telling me it needs 7 mb of space.

So then I tried not even making a partition. It gave me a different error this time. It told me it couldn't detect whether my HD was NTFS or FAT (something like that, I don't remember the abbreviations)

Any ideas? I'm all out.

Old technology and new technology don't get along it seems.

What partition type did you use? I don't think FAT16 or FAT12 can handle 1 gig sizes, and it's probably throwing everything off. You need FAT32 for that, and I don't know if any versions of DOS before 7 support it.

And unpartitioned space isn't recognized as any kind of drive, anywhere, at all. It must be partitioned to be used.

I used fdisk (the dos 5.0 version) to create a primary dos partition. For some reason, the file system says "unknown"

EDIT: And it had windows 95 on it before, so I'm not sure why it isn't working this time.

I figure maybe I can just make directories on the C drive with the boot disk and put stuff there.

Do you still want to use your parents' computer? I'd avoid installing a second OS there. You'd probably leave quite visible tracks. Go for a boot CD with some sort of Linux in combination with a USB stick or so to store data. But that might get difficult on a system with only 16 megs. In that case I'd suggest to just get a very cheap used old computer.

Unless they'd forbid you to get one of your own. In that case it would really be time to have a calm and serious talk with them. Maybe you could get a teacher or some other adult person they respect to speak to them? Learning to exploit the full powers of a computer is pretty valuable and should come handy in your futur life.

Mars: I figure I have a system right here, and it'd probably be cheaper just to replace the HD and boost the ram. I'll just build off of this one.

So is it your own or your parents'?

It is my own.

Then go on.

If you still want to go with DOS...

1.) fdisk, Primary Partition, 100% space
2.) restart
3.) format c: /s
4.) you can put files on C:\

Did you format it? If it doesn't get formatted you will have 0mb space to use.
And not a quick format either. You have to do a full format.
Every time you set the partitoin different, the format is lost and needs to be done all over again.

Hah, yeah, I figured out that I had to format it, and I got windows 95 to install. Or so I thought.

It turns out I had the wrong CD in (A newer version, the CD is corrupt) and it was missing some dll's. It installed windows, but it didn't run. It wouldn't actually start. So I tried uninstalling windows. Didn't work.

So I figured "hey, why don't I just format C:\ again?"

No dice, it said "invalid drive specification"

So I went to fdisk and deleted the primary partition. It deleted it, and I said "Hey, lets make a new partition." It told me there was no space to make a partition! What do I do?

DOS (and Windows) FDISK sucks (as you found out). Either get a copy of Partitition Magic, or use Linux fdisk. You should be able to run it from a livecd.

Would linux fdisk work on dos? Like if I put it on a floppy.

No, it only works in Linux. But it'll work from a Linux bootfloppy or liveCD.

No, Linux fdisk doesn't work on DOS. But you should be able to start this fdisk from a Linux live floppy/cd/dvd/whatever. A nice Linux floppy is this: http://www.toms.net/rb/. It also has fdisk.

EDIT: Beaten!

I was going to suggest that boot floppy, but I'd lost the link (I still have a bootfloppy though).

Hey Evan! With DOS Fdisk it is VITAL that you reboot after adding/deleting partitions, THEN format any new partitions you've made.
With the linux fdisk you can make DOS partitions, but you need to be running a linux kernel to use it (such as the one on the linux boot floppy) and you'll still need to format the parition before it will be usable.

Also if you have any luck getting a working DOS, try DJGPP it's a first rate C/C++ compiler for DOS with 32-bit protected mode, a source editor etc and Allegro supports it! (I think fix.bat still has a djgpp option!) Anyway the site has all the details...

If I remember correctly, FAT supports up to 2gb, right? So you hard drive should be just fine in DOS.

How do I fit tomsrstbt(sp?) on one floppy, it's 2.1 mb?

FAT32 does. I dunno about FAT12 or FAT16.

FAT16 supports up to 4GB.
Don't even consider using FAT12. A 32MB limit is a little useless

Answer: You can't!! (Well I'm assuming that file is already compressed) What you can try doing is using a filesplitter program to split the file into chunks (and generate a small .bat file to join them back together!), that will fit on to floppies. Once you have all the chunks together on a harddrive, run the .bat file to join all the chunks back together into the full file again.

If you have trouble finding a DOS filesplitter, I think I have a simple one somewhere, in the dark and seldom visited corners of my HDD!

But this is stupid ... you need an existing DOS/Windows 9x to make a Linux boot floppy.
I don't know about Windows XP, but I don't think you can create the floppy there.

If this Linux fdisk stuff has been brought along enough for you, you may try XFdisk (or your Partition Wizard).

You find XFdisk at http://www.mecronome.de/xfdisk/index.php.

Floppy disks can hold more than the advertised 1.4 MB, but not if they're formatted with FAT12 by DOS.
You'll need a programme that can write the raw disk image to disk directly, bypassing the filesystem. I know these exist for DOS but you'll need to google around for it. In Linux, one can do something like dd if=diskimag of=/dev/floppy (assuming /dev/floppy is a symlink to the floppy device) to write directly to the floppy.

That's not going to be much help: the file in question is a diskimage for a bootfloppy.

Not at all. You can do it just fine from Linux. What you need is a computer with a working operating system to create the floppy with.

As Evert mentioned, you can write more to a diskette than 1.44 MB. Some Distros use dd/rawwrite to write over 2MB to a single disk.. My newish old floppy drive had a funt time reading one of those, but a regular old drive handled it no problem.

For some reason, I remember having to format a floppy to be 1.66 mb or something like that, and after that it fit just fine.

I'll try and find the instructions.

Thanks for all the help!

While were at the subject, you may wan't to check this out: Interesting DOS programs. There are some useful applications there.

1.44 MB floppies cannot hold more than 2 MBs.