Just an offtopic, is there something really specific to people dual boot ms-dos with Windows 98?since ehm, window 98 is an "MS-DOS APP" so, you already has a fully working ms-dos?
Idk, that's why I'm asking that, I'm still a ms-dos newbie...

ibm5155 wrote:

Just an offtopic, is there something really specific to people dual boot ms-dos with Windows 98?since ehm, window 98 is an "MS-DOS APP" so, you already has a fully working ms-dos?
Idk, that's why I'm asking that, I'm still a ms-dos newbie...

I need to do more digging on it. It's not Windows 2000 levels of "This looks like DOS, but it's really not," but it's definitely a different animal from DOS 6.22 as near as I can tell. Also, if you type in the "VER" command, you don't get a DOS version (I believe Win 95 still gave one, but I could be mistaken and no longer have a copy to test) but a Windows 98 version.

Also, for whatever reason, rebooting from the GUI in Win 98 into "MS-DOS mode" totally nixes the sound in DOS games. No idea why because my config files are fine. F8 into the boot menu and select command prompt though and everything is fine.

Again, it may just be growing pains as I haven't used Win 98 in WELL over a decade, but it annoys the hell out of me now that I've finally gotten my MS-DOS skills dusted off again.

Runicen wrote:

ibm5155 wrote:

Just an offtopic, is there something really specific to people dual boot ms-dos with Windows 98?since ehm, window 98 is an "MS-DOS APP" so, you already has a fully working ms-dos?
Idk, that's why I'm asking that, I'm still a ms-dos newbie...

I need to do more digging on it. It's not Windows 2000 levels of "This looks like DOS, but it's really not," but it's definitely a different animal from DOS 6.22 as near as I can tell. Also, if you type in the "VER" command, you don't get a DOS version (I believe Win 95 still gave one, but I could be mistaken and no longer have a copy to test) but a Windows 98 version.

Windows 9x is the evolution of WfW 3.11 in a lot of ways. It runs on top of DOS, but unlike WfW it tries to take over all hardware access as long as the appropriate drivers are there. If you drop down to "MS-DOS mode" you are in a true DOS environment (it reports itself as 7.10 to applications) sans all the utilities a fully-fledged DOS distribution comes from) with FAT32 support.
Oh, and the VER command is hardcoded to show "Windows 98" inside COMMAND.COM, but this doesn't really affect anything.

Runicen wrote:

Also, for whatever reason, rebooting from the GUI in Win 98 into "MS-DOS mode" totally nixes the sound in DOS games. No idea why because my config files are fine. F8 into the boot menu and select command prompt though and everything is fine.

Again, it may just be growing pains as I haven't used Win 98 in WELL over a decade, but it annoys the hell out of me now that I've finally gotten my MS-DOS skills dusted off again.

Your sound card has Windows drivers that initialize the card properly and expose SoundBlaster compatibility to DOS apps. When in "MS-DOS" mode those drivers are gone, so you have to set up the sound cards as you would do in DOS. If it is a jumpered card, all you need is the correct environment variables. If not, then you need either a PnP utility, some specific initialization app or drivers that emulate an ISA SB card.

I have done this with both 98se and 95 what worked for me was to install on two HDDs first install DOS6.22 on C: you can install win3.1 along with it install all the drivers or software, after that is done boot the machine to dos from your C: drive not a floppy and load win9x setup from the cd and install onto D: drive. After win9x is installed when you hit F8 one of the options will be "load previous version of MS-DOS" select that and DOS6.22 should load, once it has booted you can still load win3.1 by typing "win" I did this just for fun but everything did seem to work

ibm5155 wrote:

Just an offtopic, is there something really specific to people dual boot ms-dos with Windows 98?since ehm, window 98 is an "MS-DOS APP" so, you already has a fully working ms-dos?
Idk, that's why I'm asking that, I'm still a ms-dos newbie...

I can only speak for my self, when I say that running Win9X is just not exactly the same as running MS-Dos-6.22. (or 3 to 5 for that matter)
For me, it is a matter of running it, the way I personally ran stuff back in pre95 day's. I even used MS-Dos-6.22 as late as 2001/03.
When running games such as Wolf3D, Doom1/2, Dynablaster and all the other games, I really prefer the simple UI found in MS-DOS-6.22.
It loads faster, I can navigate it faster and well... It's Nostalgia and somewhat a "real" OS, faster OS. Compared to those with GUI's.
This is just my personal opinion on the main differences on Win9X/MS-Dos-6.22, and why I do multiboot.
I am not saying that Win9X is a bad OS in any way, just that I grew up on text based UI's, such as C64/MS-Dos-3.3 and MS-Dos-6.22.
And this is why I multiboot, have multiple retro computer's and rarely run MS-Dos games in Win9X (Doom is one exception)

On Topic:
You have multiple choices on this multiboot thing. And I have two personal preferances, amoungst all the boot managers out there.
There is of course the old Os/2 boot manager, found on the two (or three) first floppy based Os/2-3.0 install-disk-set.
It is great for machines with HDD's with less capacity/less size than 8.0 gigabyte. Larger, it is not possible to use it.
Another option, is to use the "XFDISK" found on the "Ultimate-Boot-Disc". It reminds of Os/2's and even has floppy-boot option
build into it. Wich Os/2's does not have. Just remember, that I had problems running UBCD on first-gen-P1 machine's.

When wanting to install a new os, they both are working in this way:
The partition last selected, are the one wich has it's "active partition"-flag set high, even after a reboot.
Wich means that it is easy to use something like a Dos/win9X-BootDisk in order to format a partition or install MS-Dos-6.22

Hope this help's a bit...

Just so I'm clear, both DOS and Win 98 were installed to my C: partition. It's a 6gb drive, so I divided it into 3 2gb partitions.

With both installed to C:, does that mean I can't use the "load previous version of MS-DOS" option in the boot menu or will it work regardless? I avoided that option for some irrational reason in my play with the system thus far.

Not the way I want to go, as I do not consider this as real dual boot.
A real dual boot, will be a special menu, loaded onto it's own partition and every entry in the menu is an actual primaery partition.
Using you'r setup (Dos and Win98), you will have two entry's in the bootmanager-menu. One Dos and one Win98.
Each entry in the menu, will be Dos on the first primaery and Win98 on the second primaery.
Whenever one is selected, you will have no access to the other. As one of them will allways be invisible.
For cross-file copy between each OS's, you will have to make an extended partition, and an logical inside that.
Wich will be visisble at all time. In other words, it will be loaded as "D:"

brostenen are you talking about using a boot manager like "Grub"? I never thought of using a boot manager, also if you were using 2 HDDs you could change the boot device priority in bios. Using the other method I mentioned did not work with 2 partition on same drive they end up sharing the same SYS. and BAT. I agree that DOS6.22 runs faster than win9x versions, if you are going to use win9x on older system like a 5x86 or older win95 is usually a better choice

stuvize wrote:

brostenen are you talking about using a boot manager like "Grub"? I never thought of using a boot manager, also if you were using 2 HDDs you could change the boot device priority in bios. Using the other method I mentioned did not work with 2 partition on same drive they end up sharing the same SYS. and BAT. I agree that DOS6.22 runs faster than win9x versions, if you are going to use win9x on older system like a 5x86 or older win95 is usually a better choice

Yes. Managers like Grub, just not Grub as it is too annoying to set up. And I don't use two harddrives.
I use one harddrive with a boot manager, two primaery partitions and one extended with one logical inside that.
Just as I described in my previous post. This way, nothing will be shared between the two operating systems.
This is just the way I have been doing since like 1992/93 (or something like that) when I started using Os/2 v2.1

EDIT:
When you have installed the Extended Fdisk, and the boot-manager that comes with it.
Then you will get a menu on boot, like on this picture.

When you choose menu-item1 in the menu, the partition wich menu-item2 refers to, will be set as inactive/be hidden.
It's simply a question of what partition have a "bootable flag" set high, and what partition has no "bootable flag" set.

Interesting ideas all around.

I suppose the only question I would have had is resolved by the extended partition containing the logical partition (which, since I have three partitions on this drive and only use two, is a pretty solid idea). Since I don't want to go to the trouble of creating additional security to plug this in to my home network, the only easy ways I have to transfer GOG games sans their DOSBox component to my old Dell involve either using smaller thumb drives or burning them to CD-R. In either case, the GUI makes transferring from these far easier, so the shared data drive is essential.

Oh, I suppose it should be asked - is it easier to set up one of these dual boots (or is it even necessary) using Windows 95 vs. Windows 98? This is more of a reference question, but I did find an upgrade disc for 95, which I didn't recall having, so it's an option now if that would make things any easier overall.

You can do whatever you want, but generally speaking, unless dealing with some very obscure cases, it is not necessary to dual-boot DOS 6.x and Win9x, and doing so brings no practical advantage.

Win9x in pure DOS mode (BootGUI=0) is, in fact, pure DOS (plus the support for large drives and FAT32). There are differences between it and DOS 6.x, just like there are differences between DOS 6.x and 5.x or 5.x and older. But, again, with the exception of very obscure cases, it is the same for DOS games and apps.

Reading between the lines the link below shows the main difference between using Dos 6 and Win9x Dos.
http://www.mdgx.com/mem6.htm
Basically you get a more efficient emm386 and himem.sys
Edit.com also supports opining multiple documents in the later version.
They are the only differences I've noticed. But I still run Dos 6.22 on my 486 for nostalgia but have copied the above files across and all work fine on an older version of dos, best of both words.

I cant see the point of duel booting between Dos and Win9x As mentioned above any sound issues, CD issues, issues, issues will be down to needing to configure the drivers. BUT its your PC so if you want to duel boot I say do it!

I've only really used MS's previous OS boot menu. You can even install to the same drive, just not the same folder
I'll admit the MS option has 2 major limitations.
1) If you break an OS there is no clean easy way to reinstall just the 1 OS
2) If you want to run Win95 and Win98, well you cant.

In the end I would try all of the above and do what works for you in the end.

If you have two IDE hard drives on the same channel, you could install Windows on one drive and DOS on the other, then buy/build and install something like this:

It's a switch that connects to the jumpers on the drives and allows you to select which drive is master, thereby choosing which drive will boot. I did this on my first custom build to dual-boot Windows 2000 with Slackware Linux, and it worked quite well. It has the advantages of not requiring any software bootloaders or changes to the boot priority in the BIOS, and if necessary one of the drives could be reformatted or even physically removed without affecting the other drive whatsoever. I'll admit, this was something I missed from the upgrade to SATA on a later custom build.

There was a commercial version of this switch called the NickLock (which is what the picture shows), but they currently seem to be made of unobtainium. They're quite easy to build though, I made mine out of some keyboard lock switches salvaged from a couple old AT cases and just mounted them in the panel on an empty drive bay. If you do make your own, I recommend turnkey switches and not toggle switches, because toggle switches are too easy to accidentally bump. Although I've never actually tried changing master/slave settings while a computer was running, I imagine accidentally doing so would result in Very Bad Things™.

Windows 98 and MS-DOS mode can often be setup incorrectly. Like loading DOS drivers in the Windows start-up files.

I did a tutorial showing my method, it involves modifying the PIF file of MS-DOS mode and installing a boot menu and driver pack for mouse and CD-ROM. Drivers and video can be found here:

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-mode-tutorials.html

It's a bit long-winded but once you understand the steps it's really easy.

I use this with a 120 GB drive in a Pentium 100. I use Windows 98 for easy networking, copying of files.

I still stand by ExtendedFdisk, for me it is the most convenient sollution of them all.
Whenever one OS breaks, I will try to load that partition, and just reboot.
That partition is still set to boot-able, and I just have to insert a bootfloppy for that OS.
Then I press F1, and the floppy will load. The "C-Drive/Bootdrive" will then be the drive
wich is the one with the broken OS. Really easy, and all other primary drives are in-accessible
from the OS that are loaded.

This way... If I want to play Monkey Island, I just disable some cache and boot into MS-Dos-6.22
And if I want to play Diablo-II, I just enable all cache and boot into Win98se.
Perfect for multiple system setup in one box. (a bit like that 4in1 machine, yet a bit different)

True, but you are limited to FAT 16, whereas with MS-DOS 7.1 you can use a 120 GB drive if you like and have all the games ready to go 😀

I like using "BOOTCONFIG" on MSDOS.SYS. Then create a boot menu with three entrues - Windows 98, MS-DOS (Norma - XMS+EMS+UMBs) and MS-DOS (XMS only). Then just fine tune AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to send things to the right UMB region to maximize conventional memory on that specific computer. Then just set a small timeout and that is it.

philscomputerlab wrote:

True, but you are limited to FAT 16, whereas with MS-DOS 7.1 you can use a 120 GB drive if you like and have all the games ready to go 😀

True....
Personally I do not play that many games that I can fill up 2gb.
So for me, it is not that important anyway.

You need to hide the dos partition before installing windows otherwise win9x will overwrite dos 6.22 bootup files with 7/7.1.

I use grub4dos because it has a lot of options
http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/multiboot.htm