Nothing, (unless you copy the whole game disk to a ram drive and run it from there)
The game is accessing the floppy disk because it needs data from it
just like a modern game that is installed on a hard drive needs to access the hard drive

if its a game that comes on floppy that is installed to a hard drive it could be checking you have the original floppy for piracy prevention reasons

Bit lost? Title says booting dos from floppy so am I right in thinking Windows is installed on C:\ and your using the floppy to bypass the GUI?
You can try Path=c:\ (wherever your system files are, usually c;\windows\command) in fact you can run the files direct from there, no need to have them on the floppy.

You can make a shortcut win Windows to command.com and in property's force it to boot into dos mode and enter the command/autoexec config in there. This will continue to boot into dos mode until typing exit when it will revert booting into windows again.

Other option maybe to get a Gotek floppy drive. At lest the access times will be bit quicker

What you probably want is SET COMSPEC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMSPEC
COMMAND.COM has a transient part in memory which can be overwritten by large applications. When the application is closed, COMMAND.COM loads that part back from disk. By default it loads from where it booted, so if you booted from floppy, it will load COMMAND.COM from floppy again. By using SET COMSPEC you can redirect it to a copy of COMMAND.COM on your harddisk, effectively making DOS behave the same as if it booted from HDD.
Or perhaps SHELL=<path> in CONFIG.SYS instead: http://www.robvanderwoude.com/command.php

Imperious wrote:

I'm not a noob as far as setting up a floppy Dos boot goes, and have just created my first menu system after years of using mult […]
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I'm not a noob as far as setting up a floppy Dos boot goes, and have just created my first menu system after years of using multiple
disks with different configs.

My question has to do with Access of the Floppy drive after booting has finished. Quite often the game or whatever is being
run will feel the need to access the floppy again, which of course slows everything down. My question is what, if anything can
be added to Autoexec.bat or Config.sys to avoid this happening?
I prefer the system to boot to Windows (95 or 98se depending on computer) by default. Other alternative is to somehow boot to
Dos from HDD with an option to boot into Windows from there if that's possible with 95 or 98.

You say you're using a "menu system", so what exactly are you using the floppy drive for?

Thanks for all the replies everyone, but essentially I'm just booting into Dos from a floppy to avoid Windows, and I have setup multiple configurations with different memory
managers, clean boot, etc. Sorry Jorphos, menu system wasn't the right term to use.

Scali has probably given the correct answer, as I am already using Shell= and the Path command and the floppy still gets accessed from time to time.
I'll try COMSPEC and see how that goes.
I'll report back if that's successful.

I have been thinking about getting a Gotek drive, so might ret that if COMSPEC doesn't stop the floppy from being accessed at times after boot.

What exactly are you trying to achieve?

If you want the flexibility of running or not running the Windows GUI on boot, the easiest thing is to just set BootGUI=0 in Msdos.sys, and possibly setting a menu system where one option runs Win.com after booting finishes, and another does not.

If for whatever reason you need/want to use a version of DOS which is not DOS 7.x, then Win9x support dual-booting to a previous MS-DOS version (thin can be set up via their startup menus, and BootMulti=1 setting in Msdos.sys). This works automatically if DOS was installed before Win9x, I am not sure how/if it can be "injected" into the hard drive if it wasn't already there at the time of the Win9x install.

In any case, booting DOS from a floppy disk as you do is one of the last things I would try. Slow and cumbersome, I can't think of a reason why it should be the preferred method.

I realise it's slow, but don't really care about that as we are only talking about a few extra seconds. All I was trying to achieve is once booted into Dos from the floppy,
then I don't want the floppy to be accessed anymore at all, but that's unfortunately not how it works.
I will try using Comspec 1st and see how that goes, then play around with Bootgui in MSDOS.sys. It will be Tomorrow night before I try this, so will see then what works best.

I don't really want to run Dos 6.22 as that restricts HDD partition size to 2GB, and I have a 40GB HDD with Overlay at the moment, a bit of an overkill obviously as my
original 486 machine had a 420MB drive, but then It also had 8MB ram vs 64MB in the current setup.

You can avoid having to edit MSDOS.SYS entirely if you just hit F8 when "Starting Windows 95..." appears and select "Command Prompt Only", but as previously suggested you will probably also want to set up a boot menu in config.sys .

(Pressing F4 might do the same thing, but I think that only works in the aforementioned case where MS-DOS was installed previously.)

Imperious wrote:

Thanks for all the replies everyone, but essentially I'm just booting into Dos from a floppy to avoid Windows...

Another way to boot directly to DOS on a Windows 95/98 computer is by creating a desktop shortcut to command.com and configuring it to reboot to DOS mode with a custom config.sys and autoexec.bat (use the Advanced button on the Program tab in the shortcut, Choose "Specify A New MS-DOS Configuration," and type in your config.sys and autoexec.bat the way it would be on a boot floppy).

If you use the shortcut to boot to DOS, and then turn the computer off without typing "exit," it will boot directly to DOS next time you turn the computer on.

I do this with a 486 with Windows 95 that I mostly use for DOS games -- as long as I don't type "exit" at the DOS prompt, it boots in DOS.

The only problem is if you mess up your config.sys and autoexec.bat options so the computer goes into a reboot loop (I did this once when tweaking sound card settings). But it's easy enough to fix -- boot off a boot floppy and delete, edit, or rename the C:\autoexec.bat and C:\config.sys to get out of the reboot loop. The original config.sys and autoexec.bat from before you made the shortcut will have been renamed to config.wos and autoexec.wos when you used the shortcut so they won't be lost.

skitters wrote:

The only problem is if you mess up your config.sys and autoexec.bat options so the computer goes into a reboot loop (I did this once when tweaking sound card settings).

Oh! I read about that exactly once – specifically, a dire warning in the readme for Electronoid, a DOS game by Pixel Painters. Until now I never understood how it could happen. The riddle is solved at last!

Thought I had better update this before I go back to using my original Username here.

This worked SHELL=C:\DOS\COMMAND.COM C:\DOS /E:512 /P

The extra C:\DOS after COMMAND.COM stops the floppy from being accessed after boot has finished.