Wow, what a great bunch of informative replies! That's why this Forum is so The original idea was to create a bootable CD out of an '80s-era DOS disk, and boot from there. Rather than dosbox, you can use Qemu (+Qemu Manager) or any other VM on modern hardware. (in practice the ONLY partitions types that DOS pre 7.x can use (besides the "historical" 01 and 04), so you will have problems NOT only with NTFS access) Note that VFAT is 16-bit FAT with long filenames FAT32 is a different filesystem. Windows NT can create up to 4 GB FAT16 filesystems (using 64 KB clusters), but these cause problems for DOS and Windows 95/98. Partitions, or at least the FAT16 filesystems created on them, are at most 2 GB for DOS and Windows 95/98 (at most 65536 clusters, each at most 32 KB). MS-DOS LASTDRIVE=26 is good for at most 24 disk partitions Novell DOS 7+ allows LASTDRIVE=32). This chain (linked list) can have arbitrary length, but some FDISK versions refuse to make more logical partitions than there are drive letters available (e.g. Using type 05 for extended partitions beyond 8 GB may lead to data corruption with MSDOS.Īn extended partition is a box containing a linked list of logical partitions. Supports at most 8.4 GB disks: with type 05 DOS/Windows will not use the extended BIOS call, even if it is available. Could you be more specific exactly what you want to do. It will give you an "incorrect version" error. Anytime you try and mix different versions of DOS, it will give you an error stating "incorrect version of ," or whatever program you try to swap.įor example, you cannot take the "command" or "fdisk" from DOS 3.0 and expect them to work with system files from DOS 6. I would Google "Dos Ram limit" or "Dos hard disk limit." Something to that effect.Īs far as your alternative. You can look up the exact data on the net because I'm not sure. And it had limits as far as hard disk size, partitions, and the amount of RAM it could handle. (The last real version of DOS, meaning it wasn't buried underneath Windows 9x, was version 6.22. Getting your plain DOS 3.0 floppies to run on anything newer than a 1995-era computer will take work. The drive has to be formatted first to FAT32. If you type "Dir c:" and it returns an error, then obviously it won't read a NTFS drive. You could get the floppy drive installed and working, you might even get the floppy disk to load whatever version of DOS is on it, but it probably won't do anything more than load into memory. But I'm curious to see if the same thing is possible on a current computer without resorting to something like DOSbox.Īre you trying to burn an iso from DOS? Or trying to burn an ISO of DOS 3.0? Can you clarify that. Of course, if I want the authentic "retro" experience, I can simply fire up my still-functional Sanyo MBC-550, load MS-DOS, and launch WordStar. Then there is the fact that these are 16-bit operating systems, whereas modern PCs will be 32- or 64-bit systems. The trouble might be porting the hidden system files (IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS) so that they can become part of the ISO and boot the system. If I install a floppy drive on a modern computer and put an MS-DOS boot disk in it, then power cycle the PC - will the computer boot into DOS?Īnd supposing that it does, is it safe to try to get it to read from and write to an NTFS hard disk? I know that DOS doesn't know anything about NTFS, but the question is: will it screw up the hard disk if I try?Īs an alternative, just for the fun of it I've been toying with the idea of copying some of my old MS-DOS 3.1 or 3.3 5.25" floppies over to a computer that can take, for example, COMMAND.COM and CONFIG.SYS to create and burn a bootable ISO on a CD. Two questions for which I'm hoping that someone(s) can provide an answer:
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