It's kind of pointless, really. I don't think you're likely to see any kind of noticeable difference between them. If you have some specific tests in mind, just use boot floppies and get it over with.

But if you really want to go ahead with this, you could probably boot between four different DOS versions at a time. Just set up four primary partitions on your hard drive. Then you can toggle the active partition using GRUB, or just set it manually using some partitioning tool.

The only catch is that the active partition will always be drive C when you reboot, which means your drive letters will always be changing.

For boot manager
Payware
Acronis OS Selector but have install in to Windows I don't know if has dos recovery other then you have LiveCD
Powerquest Partition Magic was best one it dose have dos recovery floppy and can make a boot floppy cd and there can be copy to the harddrive

Freeware
Plop Boot Manager
GAG Boot Manager
Smart Boot Manager

You also need a disk partition tool
There a lot option here know as LiveCD I don't know which one of hand have ture dos support most of them are Linux base

As for
IBM PCDOS 7 = Win95 MSDos 7
I'm not a Fan of FreeDos

shspvr wrote:

IBM PCDOS 7 = Win95 MSDos 7

What on Earth gave you that idea?

shspvr wrote:

For boot manager Payware Acronis OS Selector but have install in to Windows I don't know if has dos recovery other then you have […]
Show full quote

For boot manager
Payware
Acronis OS Selector but have install in to Windows I don't know if has dos recovery other then you have LiveCD
Powerquest Partition Magic was best one it dose have dos recovery floppy and can make a boot floppy cd and there can be copy to the harddrive

Freeware
Plop Boot Manager
GAG Boot Manager
Smart Boot Manager

You also need a disk partition tool
There a lot option here know as LiveCD I don't know which one of hand have ture dos support most of them are Linux base

As for
IBM PCDOS 7 = Win95 MSDos 7
I'm not a Fan of FreeDos

Nope. IBM and Microsoft released their own versions of DOS when MS-DOS 6 and PC-DOS 6.1 were released. PC DOS 7 is not the same DOS 7 that underlies Windows 95.

Kind of pointless? Arguably true, but seems like a fun project to me.

I remember for one thing that i used to have a hell of a time constantly tweaking config/autoexec in msdos just to have enough conventional memory to run my stuff. Having a multiple DOS setup could be a pretty cool commodity once installed. Anyway im gonna make some tests, some interesting suggestions so far. Thanks guys.

MaxWar wrote:

Btw, Just acquired a MQX-16S interface ( should be 100% mpu401 compatible): that is the main motivation for switching from DosBox to the real thing 😁

Nice!

We have a thread if you like to share a picture of your MPU401 card!

I just use CF cards in my retro PC. The card reader is at the back (CF>IDE) and I have multiple cards which I can easily swap out (one for Dos 6.22, one for FreeDOS and one for W98SE).

Games are on another CF card inside the PC.

Main reason I do this is because it's easier this way to load stuff onto them on my desktop PC. If you have several partitions, a USB > CF adapter only seems to give me access to the first partition.

CF cards are sooooo cheap, so just buy them in bulk 🤣

CF cards uh? Thats a pretty damn good idea! I am talking note for the future!

I remember for one thing that i used to have a hell of a time constantly tweaking config/autoexec in msdos just to have enough conventional memory to run my stuff. Having a multiple DOS setup could be a pretty cool commodity once installed. Anyway im gonna make some tests, some interesting suggestions so far. Thanks guys.

You may already be aware of this but you can have one installation of DOS 6 or later, with a boot menu to choose between different CONFIG.SYS configurations.
http://dos.rsvs.net/DOSPAGE/CONFMENU.HTM

Multi-booting different versions of DOS might be a fun experiment but I think you'll just end up sticking with the one that you like best....

I did read about it a couple days ago but did not know before that, i was running msdos 5 when i was a kid 😜

Anyway i still want to go for a mutli-boot if i can, if only for the fun of it. Right now im having fun trying to collect non-corrupted floppies...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Nice! […]
Show full quote

MaxWar wrote:

Btw, Just acquired a MQX-16S interface ( should be 100% mpu401 compatible): that is the main motivation for switching from DosBox to the real thing 😁

Nice!

We have a thread if you like to share a picture of your MPU401 card!

I just use CF cards in my retro PC. The card reader is at the back (CF>IDE) and I have multiple cards which I can easily swap out (one for Dos 6.22, one for FreeDOS and one for W98SE).

Games are on another CF card inside the PC.

Main reason I do this is because it's easier this way to load stuff onto them on my desktop PC. If you have several partitions, a USB > CF adapter only seems to give me access to the first partition.

CF cards are sooooo cheap, so just buy them in bulk 🤣

I would think any solid state drive would be the last thing you would want on a vintage computer because of all the virtual memory swapping. On a modern machine with gigabytes of RAM you can get away with but it probably won't last long on a machine with the RAM limitations that some of the oldest machines have.There probably isn't any wear leveling software that will work with the operating systems of the period, either.

sliderider wrote:

I would think any solid state drive would be the last thing you would want on a vintage computer because of all the virtual memory swapping.

Memory swapping rarely ever happens on DOS machines.

sliderider wrote:

There probably isn't any wear leveling software that will work with the operating systems of the period, either.

Most CF cards and SSDs do their own wear leveling on the controller.

DonutKing wrote:

You may already be aware of this but you can have one installation of DOS 6 or later, with a boot menu to choose between different CONFIG.SYS configurations.
http://dos.rsvs.net/DOSPAGE/CONFMENU.HTM

I very much agree that this is a vastly, vastly better idea than setting up multiple boot partitions.

By the way, if you're that interested in trying different versions of DOS, you should look into DR-DOS / OpenDOS / EDR-DOS. It's a ghastly mess trying to sort out what's what and even the legality of everything; I think one flavor or another is definitely still downloadable, anyway. The big plus is that somewhere in there is FAT32 support. (I hope you're at least aware that partition sizes are limited to 2GB in vanilla MS-DOS 6.22.)

Sweeet!!! I got this to work exactly the way i wanted 😁
I now have GAG boot manager loading either MsDos, PCdos or freedos from a nice, fast loading graphical interface.

I tried other free boot managers from ultimate boot disk but they were crashing the computer when i tried to boot a partition that was not already set as active.
Gag on the other hand is different, by default it ensures only the selected primary partition is active and the other ones are hidden, thus allowing booting of multiple dos without creating conflicts or corruption. Works like a charm.

The whole process is very simple once you know what to do, I started by preparing all my partitions. I planned using parted magic live cd but my dos rig does not have enough ram to support it, so I used a partition magic boot disk.

(My machine has a 8gig hd set up as follow
1:500mb pcdos (primary)
2:500mb msdos (primary)
3:1gb Freedos ( primary)
4: Extended with ( 3x 2gb logical partitions)

-I set first primary as active, all other are hidden
-reboot with pcdos install diskette and install pc dos
-roboot with pqmagic and switch active to second primary, others are hidden.
-reboot with msdos and install msdos
etc...
when all 3 dos are installed i rebooted with ultimate boot disk and went to hdd tools -> boot management -> Gag boot manager

I installed gag, setup it with all the os, i did the hide primary partitions option ( just to be sure ) , finaly applied gag to MBR.
Rebooted, and magic happened 😁