Only sort of crazy configs I run now, are 4 Primary Dos partitions on one disk. Because Rloew TB Plus patch fixes 98 so it can have more than 1 primary partition on same disk. And I use Bootmgr to boot multiple 9x on same disk with partition hiding and share one partition between them. Point of this is too run different drivers for sound and video for game compatibility.

Partition 0 > Dos710 Pure Dos
Partition 1 > 9X WDM Drivers
Partition 2 > 9X VXD Drivers
Partition 3> Shared for file storage.

Warlord wrote on 2023-07-01, 20:32:

Only sort of crazy configs I run now, are 4 Primary Dos partitions on one disk. Because Rloew TB Plus patch fixes 98 so it can have more than 1 primary partition on same disk. And I use Bootmgr to boot multiple 9x on same disk with partition hiding and share one partition between them. Point of this is too run different drivers for sound and video for game compatibility.

PowerQuest PartitionMagic does almost the same. It juggles the partition type bytes and active flags in MBR to hide all the primary DOS partitions except the one you boot from.
The config from screenshots isn't just a product of my insanity 😀 I made it to investigate how DOS names the drives and how to work around bugs Microsoft made in 80-90s. Finally I came to writing my own Int13h hander that is loaded before DOS and fakes MBR... still debugging it 😀)

BTW: you can have up to 4 primary partitions. But `fdisk` by Microsoft is stupid enough to let you create only 2: Primary and Extended

My next DOS/Win build is looking a little strange. I'm looking at a multi-boot system, but instead of wrangling partitions, it'll be four SSDs configured very similar to this:

Warlord wrote on 2023-07-01, 20:32:

Partition 0 > Dos710 Pure Dos Partition 1 > 9X WDM Drivers Partition 2 > 9X VXD Drivers Partition 3> Shared for file storage. […]
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Partition 0 > Dos710 Pure Dos
Partition 1 > 9X WDM Drivers
Partition 2 > 9X VXD Drivers
Partition 3> Shared for file storage.

(Where partition = SSD)

The base system is a Slot 1 PII 400. I hope to use a PCI SATA controller + SATA switch to control the boot device:

I also want to get away from the usual boring routine of S3/Ark video and ESS sound.

AGP: Intel i740
PCI: Voodoo 1
PCI: ForteMedia FM801 or Yamaha YMF724
ISA: GUS Classic
ISA: PC MIDI

It's a little ambitious, but should be fun to try.

🤣 whay a bunch of 20MB parts unless there is some antique software that cannot write files to something bigger than (some ancient made for XT DOS 2.0 app ??) just a guess ;p

Horun wrote on 2023-07-02, 01:10:

🤣 whay a bunch of 20MB parts unless there is some antique software that cannot write files to something bigger than (some ancient made for XT DOS 2.0 app ??) just a guess ;p

It's the config for testing my own bootloader. So I needed lots of them to be shown at boot menu.