Not really. All the DOS6 setup floppies I've seen insist on sourcing files from A: (I guess the 5.25'' version might look for B instead? or both... not sure, I don't have that one. In any case, "floppy drive letters" only), no HDD, and certainly no subfolders. And even if you try to work around that (e.g. with "subst") you'll still run into various helper tools complaining about the wrong DOS version (and then aborting), unless you booted the machine from the DOS setup floppy - at which point you might as well go through with the entire installation from there.

If dealing with a measily four physical floppies (really only three, the last one is optional) is too much, use a Gotek.

Or if you want to go the "hacky" route - DOS7 has been extracted from Win9x and made into custom CD based installers, maybe you can glean some info from those and backport stuff to 6.

I've used a floppy drive emulator program, e0x, to install DOS 6.22 from disk images living on a network drive. I've got a boot floppy that connects to the network, mounts a network drive, checks the state of C: and if its unpartitioned, unformatted or C:\command.com doesn't exist it mounts MS-DOS 6.22 disk 1 to A: and runs setup.exe, otherwise it presents a menu allowing me to copy the windows 3.11 install files, network client installer and other bits from the network drive to C:

You can install from disk images in a virtual machine and transfer that freshly creating existing install onto a physical drive for use in the retro machine.

With a lot of work, it's possible to install MS-DOS 6 from MS-DOS 7.x.

In essence, you need DOSVER, SYS.COM and the DOS system files (command.com, msdos.sys, io.sys) from MS-DOS 6.

I've taken a video a few years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcJtP9droLo

Anyway, it's not exactly comfortable to do. But it can be done.

After you're finished making things bootable, the DOS folder can be copied over.
Assuming that you already have it (say, from your previous DOS installation yiu have performed in an emulator).

Edit: I do recommend File Maven v3 as a file manager. Because it can copy whole directory structures, supports serial/parallel connections etc.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-04-15, 06:20:

After you're finished making things bootable, the DOS folder can be copied over.
Assuming that you already have it (say, from your previous DOS installation yiu have performed in an emulator).

You mean that if I have a legit copy of dos 6.22 but I can't install it because I don't have floppy disk reader, it is that easy as downloading a 6.22 original install and copying to C: of my hard drive for the retro computer? and how will the system know that must boot from that drive?

I thought I managed to install all DOS 6.22 from a folder back in the day, but I might confuse this with getting Windows 3.x installed from a folder. It's been a while...

Edit: and this seems relevant: Installing DOS 6.22 Setup Disks without Floppy drive

davidrg wrote on 2024-04-15, 00:03:

I've used a floppy drive emulator program, e0x, to install DOS 6.22 from disk images living on a network drive. I've got a boot floppy that connects to the network, mounts a network drive, checks the state of C: and if its unpartitioned, unformatted or C:\command.com doesn't exist it mounts MS-DOS 6.22 disk 1 to A: and runs setup.exe, otherwise it presents a menu allowing me to copy the windows 3.11 install files, network client installer and other bits from the network drive to C:

This sounds pretty interesting! I've done some automation of installs which requires all the files to already be on C:, and have only played around with how the earlier parts might look. Have you got a post somewhere which shows exactly how you're doing this? Also, would you mind providing a link to that floppy emulator? I can't find it.

I probably won't get back to this install automation stuff for a while though, I'm trying to finish off one other project, and then I hope to get back to that DynaText thing!

I did a 6.22 + 3.1 bootable CD (using the dos 7.1 boot disk you can make from win98 add/remove programs 🤣) back in 2006 - and failed because the DOS installer insists on swapping disks (it checks the label, and you can't easily hotswap the virtual El Torito floppy anyway*), but then I realized that a base install of DOS (format /s) is enough to boot from HDD, and everything else is just an expand command away, so I did a dir > install.bat, opened it in edit, and put in quite a bit of effort adding "expand" before the names and the guesstimated extension afterward 🙁 😀

* Bart (the BartPE guy) actually did some nice research on this, look at 2000s versions of his website when it still had his famous and minor programs and research, but of course I didn't know until last year or so 😁

And yes, I didn't think of installing it on a VM (which I barely knew about and would probably have sucked on my P3 anyway) and then just copying the whole folder 😁

e0x is available from here: https://kannegieser.net/veit/programm/
If the disks are numbered (eg, disk1.img, disk2.img, etc) you can press F11 to go to the previous disk or F12 to go to the next disk. E0x flashes the border around the screen (won't appear on virtualbox) once its finished mounting the disk image. The command to invoke it looks like this (note the special character before the number):

1e0x.com A diskø1.img 0 0 A:\setup.exe

The boot floppy is based on nwdsk - it can autodetect PCI cards, or for ISA cards it will give you a list to choose from. I've customised the disk to remove some drivers I don't need and add those that I do, and set the default profile to automatically login to NetWare as a particular user then run a .bat file which checks the state of C: using dready.com and if that succeeds checks for C:\command.com - if either fails the DOS installer is launched from a network drive. If C: is ready and C:\command.com exists instead of launching the DOS installer it gives a menu of stuff to copy.

Booting from the disk takes a while - its got to read the entire floppy and decompress a bunch of stuff. And if the disk is unpartitioned/needs repartitioning you've got to boot from it twice, so for installing DOS alone its probably not any faster than doing it regularly using three disks, plus you've still got to sit there and switch disk images when needed. But I rarely want to only install DOS only and this lets me do DOS+Windows+NetworkClient with only a single floppy disk.

Perhaps someday I'll have a go at doing all of this via network boot and so do away with the one remaining disk.

davidrg wrote on 2024-04-18, 23:21:

e0x is available from here: https://kannegieser.net/veit/programm/

Oh, thanks, my stupid font's digits are the same height as lowercase letters, so I had no idea that was a zero between the "e" and the "x" 😁

If the disks are numbered (eg, disk1.img, disk2.img, etc) you can press F11 to go to the previous disk or F12 to go to the next disk. E0x flashes the border around the screen (won't appear on virtualbox) once its finished mounting the disk image. The command to invoke it looks like this (note the special character before the number):

Nice, I see source is available so it could be made to do something other than flash the border if necessary.

That all sounds great except for all the disk reading 😁 I have machines without boot ROMs for the NICs where I need to use a floppy with Etherboot so I can PXE boot, but at least it only has to read about 2 sectors from the floppies to load Etherboot and the rest is reasonably fast.

The ghetto way--

Since all the setup floppies are, is a collection of single-file compacted .cab archives (which can be expanded with EXPAND.EXE), it is possible to dump them all into a directory, and pair that directory with a batch file that expands them all sequentially.

You would need:

The setup floppy diskettes
A means to get the contents of the diskettes off of the diskettes, and into a loose pack folder.
A bootable diskette with fdisk, format, sys, edit, and expand on it.
More time than is really healthy or wise
A sense of radical or reckless disregard for propriety.

The basic process:

The boot floppy is used to create, partition, and format (with system) the hard disk. (Assumed CF card)
Remove the hard disk, and attach it to your selected means of manipulation, to get the loose pack folder on.
Within the loose pack folder, there is a batch file you will have to write, that calls expand.exe on each and every compressed file, and supplies (manually) the correct expanded name.
This batch file creates a directory (if it does not already exist) at C:\DOS.
It expands every file in the loose pack folder.
It copies a cleanup batch file into C:\DOS
It copies a generic config.sys and autoexec.bat to the root of the drive
It chains (via CALL) to this batch file
This new batchfile "deltree /y" the loose pack folder.
Echos to the screen that you need to reboot.

(If you are especially lazy)

Set up the DOS environment inside a virtual machine, and have the VM change the disks. (VirtualBox I know for certain allows for this.)
Use disk image handling programs (like winimage) to get access to the freshly minted C:\dos folder.
Copy the dos folder out to someplace you can reach it.
Boot the afore mentioned minimalist boot diskette on the target.
Partition, and format with system, the target system.
Attach the prepared drive to your main working machine
Copy the C:\DOS folder on.
Create minimalist Config.sys and Autoexec.bat
Profit.