First post, by AthlonBrick
Bear with me here because im relatively new to this and am definitely out of my depth, half the time i feel like a caveman at a keyboard.
I found this abandoned but, aside from a dead coincell and missing disk drive, somehow perfectly functional prolinea 4/33 machine a few weeks ago super cheap and spent the next couple of weeks learning about dos, memory management hell, old hardware(the cr-563 cd drive was odd to say the least, took me a while to get it working and realize it doesnt read burned discs) as my knowledge, especially software side was minimal.
Eventually i had dos setup with optimized mem/boot menus/win 3.11/network etc and and was copying files and games before making a backup disk image and installing 95. Yeah well seems this machine doesnt actually support any disk above 504mB despite cylinders being settable to 9999, and overflowed? stomping all over the dos install till it locked up. I was able to recover the most important files using clonezilla and testdisk, and since most of my time was spent on education and gathering files i figured id try again with a DDO.
Im currently trying to setup a dual boot system while using a DDO and install dos 6.22 and win95 osr2 to separate partitions. From what ive read its possible but requires two primary partitions, and either use a non mbr bootloader like grub4dos or just set the correct partitions active as needed. However i cant figure out how to actually create multiple primary partitions with a DDO.
Both ontrack and EZ-drive seem to only allow one primary part, dos ofcourse is the same, ranish thinks the mbr is corrupt and "fixing" it broke ez drive, and xfdisk partly works, itll create and manage partitions that dos fdisk can see and set as active but format fails and win95 fails to install aswell. Im probably missing something simple or going about this entirely wrong but im at a loss here.
As for why install dos 6.22 and windows 95, instead of just 95 and use dos 7.1 when needed, i already had msdos6 setup to my liking, plus ive read windows 3.1 and 95 dont play well together, and honestly i just like the novelty of having both available. Machine is a compaq prolinea 4/33s with effectively a 504MB bios limit, 16MB of ram, 20GB seagate HDD, ct1740 SB16, and a kingston kne20t if it helps.