Hi all. I have trouble booting from a FAT32 partition on my Zida 5SVX motherboard. It boots fine from a FAT16 partition (MS-DOS 6.22), but I want to install Windows 98. I tried using the RMPrepUSB program on Windows 10 — connected my HDD via an IDE to USB converter, selected MS-DOS bootable in RMPrepUSB, and copied DOS 7.1 files to the HDD — but no luck. After plugging this HDD into the motherboard, it shows the error "Missing operating system".

I also tried to boot the DOS 7.1 boot image in QEMU with HDD passthrough:

1qemu-system-i386.exe -drive file=C:\dos71.img -drive file=\\.\PhysicalDrive2

When it boots, I use the SYS command —

1SYS D:

After that, QEMU boots fine from the HDD, but the motherboard still drops the "Missing operating system" error.

What’s the problem? Help pls.