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Floppy booting issues

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First post, by carlosn

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I have several floppy images (both downloaded and created by WinImage)

I'm able to boot into a MS-DOS 6.22 floppy without any problems, so I know the booting mechanism works.

However, whenever I try booting into I run into a problem. In the DOSBox program window I get:

T:\>boot win95b.ima
Opening image file: win95.ima
Booting from drive ¿...    [upside down question mark is really displayed]
Starting Windows 95...
Type the name of the Command Interpreter (i.g., C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM)
a>

In the status window I get:

Loaded disk 0 from swaplist position 0 - "win95b.ima"
Loaded disk 1 from swaplist position 0 - "win95b.ima"
AX 0 DX 3
AX 0 DX 2
AX 0 DX 1
AX 0 DX 0
Write 0 to rom at fffea
Write 0 to rom at fffeb
Write 0 to rom at fffec
Write 0 to rom at fffed
Write 0 to rom at fffea
Write 0 to rom at fffeb
Write 0 to rom at fffec
Write 0 to rom at fffed

The same thing happens with both Win95b and Win98 images. I know the floppies work, since I can boot from them. Is there a trick to insuring that the boot process finds the appropriate command interpreter?

Thanks!
Carlos

Reply 1 of 6, by fish

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Win9x bootdisk uses ramdrive.sys to create a virtual drive. Maybe dosbox doesn't support ramdrive. sys? Just a guess.

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Reply 2 of 6, by MiniMax

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@fish - AFAIK, Win95 do not create an RAM-drive. Only Win98 (and perhaps only the Emergency Boot Diskette) needs/creates an RAM-drive.

@Carlos - I have the same problem - and this with the same image that I can boot succesfully with Bochs. I have not investigated it further, but *think* the problem is that the Win95 DOS is version 7.0 - and not 5.xx or 6.xx.

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Reply 3 of 6, by mirekluza

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Normal DOS works (I tried several version from 5 to 6.2). IMHO there are more important things to do than to bother about not working W9x boot disc.
Even if somebody does not have any other boot discs, there are several places on internet where you can get bootdiscs for various DOS version (search - no links here -I doubt it is legal). One usefull information: if such boot discs are distributed as EXEs, they are usually made by WinImage - it is possible to open them there and to save as plain images (usable in DOSBOX).

Mirek

Reply 4 of 6, by MiniMax

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I am not complaining about this little quirk, mirek. Far from it. If it - in some future release - happens to be fixed, it will be great. In the mean time, DOSBox works fine for me for the few games I have tested.

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Reply 5 of 6, by lwc

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It was already discussed here.

Towards the end, you'll see we established that with a good program (like big costly winimage or little freeware disk2img) every DOS that's <= 6.22 works. Every DOS that's > 6.22 (up to XP's - thanks to WD's suggestion) eventually gives the command.com prompt.

Last edited by lwc on 2021-07-26, 21:38. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 6 of 6, by carlosn

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Normal DOS works (I tried several version from 5 to 6.2). IMHO there are more important things to do than to bother about not working W9x boot disc.

I realize that this may not be of use to most, but I had a particular instance where I needed to boot into a Win 9x floppy. See my other thread:
Re: Help with non-game app

I guess it's time to start looking for an actual Win 9x machine I can use 😵

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