Accessing hard disk from DOS floppy

[lesmond74]

Hello,

I have an old IBM PIII computer which I would like to run Win 9x games on. The system will dual boot Win 95 OSR 2 and Win 98SE. Win 95 is successfully installed but I am having trouble getting Win 98 to install how I would like.

I put a reasonably modern hard drive in the system - a 160 GB Samsung. It is connected to a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 PCI controller card (using the last driver which supports drives > 137GB). I installed Win95 in a 7GB fat32 primary partition created and formatted using fdisk on a Win95 startup disk. Of course, fdisk did not see the full capacity of the drive (it thought it was 21553MB) but Win 95 installed and booted without any problems.

I then created and formatted a 30GB fat32 primary partition for Win98 using Boot-US . This program will also be the boot manager (it works by hiding and deactivating primary partitions other than the one you are booting). When Win 98 is installed I will also use Boot-US to create and format 3 x 30GB fat32 logical partitions (the formatted capacity will be 127GB to avoid problems with disk limitations in Win 9x).

To make the Win98 install easier I copied the "win98" folder from the Win 98 CD to the new partition. I would prefer to have this folder on the hard drive to save having to use the CD during the install.

After hiding and deactivating the Win 95 partition with Boot-US, I booted the system using a Win 98 startup disk. The goal is to access the Win 98 folder in order to run setup. However, I am unable to do this. At the C:\ prompt I get a "File not found" (even though the correct capacity of the partition is reported now). The same happens if I try to copy the win98 folder from the CD to the hard drive while in the DOS environment.

Is there a way I can run Win98 setup from the hard drive, as I would prefer? Or will I have to install from CD (assuming that will even work in the above setup)?

Thanks in advance.

[lesmond74]

This exercise was taking up more time than it was worth, so I decided to just install Win 98 from CD. When I did this, setup wanted to format the 30GB partition because it thought the existing file system was "incompatible with Windows 98" (even though I formatted the partition fat32). I let it reformat but after it finished it said there were errors and couldn't continue. To get around this I rebooted and chose option 2 "start computer with CD-ROM support" (as opposed to option 1, "start computer and run setup"). This boots to a command line which allowed me to run setup as follows: setup /id /im /nm /is . For those unaware what these do is:

/id - bypass disk space check

/im - cause setup to ignore the conventional memory check

/nm - bypass CPU detection

/is - cause setup not to run scandisk

Win 98 is now installed and dual booting with Win 95 via Boot-US.

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

Leave it up to a Win-7 user to find the most complicated way to do something.

[jds]

There are bugs in IO.SYS that, for some combination of partitions, cause CHS addressing of LBA partitions, with wrap-around issues and corruption. Since you haven't described your partitioning details, it's not possible to say if this is/was a factor. For details, see :

There are also bugs in earlier versions of 'fdisk'. In any case, I'd trust the 'fdisk' utility from FreeDOS over that from MS (even the updated version).

Finally, knowing nothing about Boot-US, I can only say that 'grub4dos' would be my choice to do multi-booting, it's very flexible and AFAIK, more capable than 'grub' (which I've no experience with). Otherwise, in the "native" scheme of things, you need to mark the partition table to indicate which partition is the boot partition (ie. what O/S you wish to boot).

Well, I don't know if that explains things or helps, however, I'm running late ...

Joe.

PS. If you chose to install a W9x on a drive/partition other that C:, a small portion of the installation will be located on C: anyway (default C:\WINDOWS). This is probably due to the 'WinBootDir and 'HostWinBootDrv' settings created in file C:\MSDOS.SYS (which as you should know, is a hidden text file, not a BDOS binary). To have multiple W9x installations, without contending C:\WINDOWS directories, choose alternative directory names, such as "WIN95" and "WIN98". But I'm not sure if you boot from a drive other than C:, whether W9x will look for the MSDOS.SYS file on that drive or always on drive C:.

Edited June 4, 2011 by jds