I think you can
Just make a bootable floppy first and use that for the bootable part of the cdrom.

But I never tried it though....

Yes that was what I was thinking...
Any proof? 😀

Carrera wrote:

Yes that was what I was thinking...
Any proof? 😀

A quick and easy way to verify this is to boot FreeDOS from the distribution CD. You can grab the latest ISO image at http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/, burn a CD and boot it.

Regards,

90% of laptops can boot from CD.

True, true. The point is, for the occasionaly DOS game I have yet to find a DOS that can read NTFS partitions. I haven't really looked though so I just need time...

There is none. The closest you can get is NTFS-DOS Pro, and even that is severely limited.

Carrera wrote:

True, true. The point is, for the occasionaly DOS game I have yet to find a DOS that can read NTFS partitions. I haven't really looked though so I just need time...

This one will be very tricky indeed. As Sonever pointed out, you can getr read-only access to NTFS partitions with freeware NTFSDOS from Sysinternals, or you can buy the full version, NTFSDOS Professional, that will let you read from and write to NTFS partitions from pure DOS.

Anyway, do you really need NTFS support? Can't you get along with FAT32? In this case a simple boot disk from Windows 98 or the latest FreeDOS build would work.

Update: sorry, English is not my primary language and now I believe I used the wrong verb in my original post.

Regards,

If I was you I would put my dosgames on a seperate fat32 partition.

I don't know how the other dosses would get NTFS working but it will always be worse then a win98 bootdisk.

AFAICS they would use a TSR (which takes away some basememory) or they would have written their own dos and believe me it's hard to keep it to the unwritten standard of MS.

Thanks guys, I came to that conclusion as well. FAT32 is definately the way to go!

It isn't if you do, for example, digital video editing, since FAT32 has a 2GB filesize limit.

There's no sane reason to use FAT32 on NT systems. In this situation, if you absolutely must use FAT32 (I don't view this as an excuse personally, I just gave up playing the games that didn't run adequately on an NTFS partition until workarounds evolve to a usuable stage), create a dedicated partition just for the games and leave the rest of your data on an NTFS one. You won't see the NTFS one in DOS but chances are you're not likely to want anything off the NTFS one in a hurry while you're playing games.

I do digital video editing but the software I use works around the 2 GB problem. I don't rip DVDs or anything this is good old-fashioned video restoration and wedding video stuff which usually means a maximum of 45 minutes a pop.

I, of course, would only have a 2 to 4 GB FAT 32 partition to install the games and leave the rest. It was a laptop from a colleague and I just didn't want to reformat or anything.

I know this will shock you all but I primarily use WinDOwS98SE since I have to see anything come to Windows after that that I needed...
I am not online 24 hours a day, unlike a lot of people I actually shut the computer off when I am not using it, I have an external modem that I turn on and off (takes care of any dialer software!).
Maybe I'm extremely weird (OK it has been documented that I am) but I like to have an on/off switch on just about everything if possible.
I even have 2 Voodoo 2s in SLI mode !
For what I do (DOS, Windows, GLide, VERY basic web and video editing/restoration) I have yet to see a software or operating system out there that can do better "because it is newer".

I remember when my brother-in-law install Windows NT 3.51 on my old Penitum 75Mhz (!) with 16 (!) MB of RAM "because it was new" and the damn thing took an hour, I am NOT kidding you a whole HOUR to boot.
Format C: Win95 OSR2 and about 2 hours later that was again a "screaming" machine! 😀

I realize that within a year or two no hardware will work on my system and that I will have to take in the wallet to appease Microsoft but I have survived so far!

In case someone misreads this: I am not cirticizing ANY of the feedback here! It has all confirmed exactly what I was thinking and I appreciate it! It is only that I have not had enough coffee and the cat ate my showlaces (AGAIN!).

Perhaps I've missed something along the way but if you use Windoze 9x then why do you need your DOS to support NTFS?

It was for a WindowsXP laptop of a colleague of mine. He wanted to try the CD boot to get DOS running on the machine and that's when I thought of NTFS issue...