I for one see no advantage in sticking with MS-DOS 6.22.

But if you do decide to go with that, you might as well just use the small hard drive. If it was on the 40 GB, not only would you have to put the FAT16 partition within the first 8 GB of the drive (I think), but if you wanted to boot off of it, you'd also have to make it a primary partition (as opposed to a logical partition). Secondly, a 2 GB FAT16 partition uses a 32k cluster size, which means you'd end up with a lot of empty "slack space" anyway.

The only reason I've heard to use DOS 6.11 is to save some conventional memory. DOS 7.1 seems to be completely compatible, all games and things should run fine on it (can anyone verify this?). So that's the big question - Fat32 vs more conventional memory.

I use Dos 7.1. Not only is it great having huge drives, but I find booting Win98se just by typing "win" to be very handy.

Also, it's not that hard to free up conventional memory in Dos 7.1. About the only thing in my config.sys file is himem. Formerly I used emm386, but then I discovered Jemm386, which I find superior to emm386 in every way, plus you can load it from the command line when a game requires expanded memory instead of rebooting and dealing with a config.sys menu. All this and it take less than 1k of conventional memory...

http://www.japheth.de/Jemm386.html

If you want to get really into it, there are even newer low-memory alternatives to himem as well.

Also, things like mouse drivers are much lower in size these days. CTmouse, for example. Anyway I've been able to streamline my DOS 7.1 installation enough so that I can't even remember the last time I saw the "Free up some conventional memory" message.

I hope this helps.

micmic wrote:

1) Is there any advantage in installing 6.22 or should I go with 98SE and 7.1 from the start ?

People mostly concerned about compatibility, but generally, MS-DOS 7.1 is pretty much backward compatible for any DOS games. Just take a look on this thread.

micmic wrote:

2) If I decide to install 6.22, is it better to install it in a 2GB FAT16 partition of the 40GB drive, or use the small 1.2GB drive as an exclusive DOS drive ?

Generally, using the 1.2GB as an exclusive DOS drive is achievable even with DOS 6.22, because FAT16 supports up to 2GB of partition. Also, such thing is nice to keep things organized, that is, storing your DOS games and apps in a separate partition.

Riboflavin wrote:

The only reason I've heard to use DOS 6.11 is to save some conventional memory.

Why do you keep talking about DOS 6.11? There is no such thing.

Formerly I used emm386, but then I discovered Jemm386, which I find superior to emm386 in every way, plus you can load it from the command line when a game requires expanded memory instead of rebooting and dealing with a config.sys menu. All this and it take less than 1k of conventional memory...

http://www.japheth.de/Jemm386.html

Very interesting! There also seem to be a lot of fans of UMBPCI (such as Mr. mdgx).

Jorpho wrote:

Riboflavin wrote:

The only reason I've heard to use DOS 6.11 is to save some conventional memory.

Why do you keep talking about DOS 6.11? There is no such thing.

Um, Jorph? There actually is. 😉

Hah! Thanks for the backup KAN. 😈

But yeah. 6.22 ... hard to keep all these numbers straight. 😖

Jemm386 is very cool. The author just added an UNLOAD feature too, which pretty much makes it do everything I could want. Don't run Win.com with it running tho, my system freezes.

Riboflavin wrote:

Hah! Thanks for the backup KAN. 😈

Hehehe... Actually there ain't no PC-DOS 6.11 either; actually it is PC-DOS 6.1, and the guy I pointed out on the link made a mistake.

Riboflavin wrote:

Jemm386 is very cool. The author just added an UNLOAD feature too, which pretty much makes it do everything I could want. Don't run Win.com with it running tho, my system freezes.

Where's the download page? And does it work with any mobo chipset? (IIRC UMBPCI doesn't, although it's a moot point since it works on intel 845 chipset anyway)

Here's a direct link:

http://www.japheth.de/Download/Jemm545.ZIP

This thing seems to be in active development. He just added the UNLOAD feature within the last month (and didn't change the version number... odd).

It seems to work with nearly any chipset, from what I can tell. It's optimized for Pentium Pro+, which is something Microsoft never did with emm386 and probably accounts at least partially for how impressive it performs. He's also gone to some effort to make it compatible with UMBPCI, details in the readme.

Riboflavin wrote:

Here's a direct link:

http://www.japheth.de/Download/Jemm545.ZIP

Thanks!

You are welcome!

By the way, micmac, personally I think you should go with dos 7.1, forget about 6.22, and don't even think about 8. And yeah, 6.11 um... doesn't exist. Sorry. Wrong key. 😜

And congrats on finding an AWE64 Gold. Great card. You might have to use CTCM to configure it, but it's not too hard. Have fun!

I've got a similar configuration, I dual boot Win98SE and WinXP and I configured my boot hard drive into 2 partitions, a 512MB Fat16 as C and the rest as FAT32 as D. Win98 is installed on D, (I have 2 more HD's with XP installed on the third in the F partion).

Even though I don't have Dos on my boot menu, the FAT16 drive gives me the ability to boot from a Dos 6.xx or 5.xx floppy and still have a hard drive I can use. While rare, I seem to remember a couple of games that had issues with Fat32 and quite a few installers that have problems when your free space is too large.

So far the biggest challenge for me has been getting XP to work with all of my hardware. For some reason it doesn't seem as flexible in re-assigning IRQ's as Win98, i.e. when I plug in a bus mouse so I can use it for DOS, my mobo assignes IRQ12 to it, Win98 shuffles the existing devices on IRQ12 to other IRQ's while WinXP just hangs when trying to start up. Very frustratiing. XP also hangs when I try to reserve IRQs 5,7 and 9 in my BIOS settings for my isa SB16 and SCC-1.

As for JEMM, it is the way to go for a pure dos environment, however it doesn't seem to play nice with Win98, i.e. I can't load it in my config.sys then start up Win98 and have it transfer EMM handling to Win98 as EMM386 and QEMM386 do. QEMM works well in this regard however the version I have appears to be limited to 256MB of RAM and I have 1GB. So I'm stuck having to use EMM386 in my config.sys in order to have EMM support in dos windows under Win98.

Riboflavin wrote:

And congrats on finding an AWE64 Gold.

It wasn't hard, I found it in a drawer somewhere. 😁 I bought this thing when it was HOT! And then it was forgotten until now. I even found its installation CD!

Thanks for the replies. I think I'll also install 6.22 just in case. It's not like I can't afford a couple of gigs.

For those of you who have multiple boots, I have another question: Let's say I have 3 partitions with DOS (FAT16), Win98SE (FAT32) and WinXP (NTFS). If I hide the partitions then each OS will not be able to see the others. But if I unhide them, then XP will be able to see DOS & Win98 and Win98 will be able to see DOS. I have done the hidden stuff before, but now I'd like to try the unhidden option. Are there any problems with unhiding all partitions ?

I always have all my partitions unhidden without problems. In fact it makes it easier since the drive letters stay the same in all OS. But I use XP's boot manager rather than true separate boot partions. If you use true boot partitions you can only have 1 active at a time.

The only gotcha is to be careful not to hide a partition "early" in the chain, since that will change the drive letter sequence. A C-drive that suddenly becomes D, an D that become E, etc, will cause havoc.

Windows 98 (and probably DOS) always insist on being C, though, regardless of the partition order. 2K/XP are a little more flexible.

Nah, I've put 9x on other partitions than C: before. The boot files require being on C:\ tho.

So the procedure for unhidden partitions is as described in this page ? Assuming one optical drive, MS-DOS would be on C, Win98 on E and WinXP on F, correct ?

But if Win98 requires the boot files to be on C, how can one boot to MS-DOS 6.22 when partitions are unhidden ?

What I meant was that regardless of your partition order and what Windows XP might call it, the active primary partition you boot Windows 98 from will be referred to by Windows 98 as drive C. No?

micmic wrote:

So the procedure for unhidden partitions is as described in this page ? Assuming one optical drive, MS-DOS would be on C, Win98 on E and WinXP on F, correct ?

But if Win98 requires the boot files to be on C, how can one boot to MS-DOS 6.22 when partitions are unhidden ?

In Dos and WIN9X, hard drives are always mapped before optical drives so you would have C, D and E hard drives in your example and the CD would be F unless you assign it to a different letter. I always specify the drive letter of my CD to avoid it changing to a different letter if I add another drive/partition in the future. My CD is currently set to K in all my OS's. I used to use X but I found there are some games that search your drives for the CD and for some reason stop at letter O and quit searching.

Here's a quick run down on how drive letters are mapped in Dos and Win9x:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment

To make things the least confusing, you would want only 1 primary partion on the first phyisical drive and if you want to run DOS 6 that would need to be a FAT16 partition. Any other partions on the 1st drive and other drives would all be Extended partitions (FAT32 if you want them to be seen by both XP and Win9x)

Win9X can be installed on another drive (mine's installed on D). It needs to have a few files on C (msdos.sys/command.com/io.sys) and msdos.sys has the information needed to tell Win9X where the rest of its files are at.

What that MS article is referring to, is if you install Win9x on a machine that already has DOS 6 on it, you will get an option to keep your old OS and Win9X will configure a menu choice that is available when you hit F8 during boot that will allow you to choose Old Version of MS/DOS. It keeps copies of your dos config.sys/io.sys/msdos.sys/autoexec.bat and copies them back over prior to the boot so the computer boots into DOS 6.

If you then subsequently install WinXP it will replace your boot sector with one that gives you an option to start either WinXP or Win9x. To get to DOS 6, you would have to first choose Win9X, then hit F8 and choose Old DOS, so you would have to go through 2 separate menus that way. There are 3rd party boot managers that would present you a menu with all 3 choices or you can just boot DOS from a floppy (which is what I do)

Theoretically you could install DOS/Win98/WinXP all on the C partition in separate subdirectories, the boot manager does permit that. However I don't recommend for a couple of reasons, first is that since it's a FAT16 partition, you are limited in space and even if you install all of your apps on another partition, a lot of them install DLLs and other stuff into the windows system directories and eventually you will run out of space. Second is that certain programs such as IE will install to a common program files directory in both Win98 and WinXP so they will end up overwriting each others IE versions and generally causing problems.