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First post, by TheCoach

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What I am looking for is a way to connect another hdd to this pc that is running winxp, format that drive with fat32, SYS it with DOS 7.x and copy over win98 install files over it.
However I can't find anything on this on the internet, everyone needs to involve floppies, cds or usb bootable drives.

Let's say I only have this one single computer and a couple of hard drives, how do I proceed.

Reply 1 of 15, by PhilsComputerLab

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I've done all that, but I could never make the drive bootable, for this step I always need a boot floppy for SYS C: command.

Everything else you can do in Windows though:

- partition and format
- Copy W98 disk into a folder
- Copy drivers, tools and software into a folder

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Reply 2 of 15, by M-HT

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You could mount the whole disk in a virtual machine and make it bootable using virtual floppy.

Reply 3 of 15, by TheCoach

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PhilsComputerLab wrote:
I've done all that, but I could never make the drive bootable, for this step I always need a boot floppy for SYS C: command. […]
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I've done all that, but I could never make the drive bootable, for this step I always need a boot floppy for SYS C: command.

Everything else you can do in Windows though:

- partition and format
- Copy W98 disk into a folder
- Copy drivers, tools and software into a folder

Yeah I know all the other steps, it's a shame there's no straight forward tool to handle the SYS part of the setup...
Maybe someone should make an already SYS'ed but completely empty hard drive image that we could just clone onto a hard drive and expand partition as needed? But this would probably be legally problematic...

M-HT wrote:

You could mount the whole disk in a virtual machine and make it bootable using virtual floppy.

I was thinking if I could somehow use DosBox BOOT command to boot up a win98se floppy with an actual hard drive mounted to SYS it, but I couldn't figure out how to get an HDD mounted AND do the BOOT command.

Reply 4 of 15, by DosFreak

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In the DOSBox 9x guide thread I have a HD images for DOSBox formatted and partitioned with freedos SYS C: which are freely distributable.

You can install 9x on FreeDOS it will just overwrite the FreeDOS boot files with the MS-DOS versions.

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Reply 5 of 15, by Sammy

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If your new HDD is Drive N: (for example) you should be able to mount a Image of a Boot-Disk in a Virtual Disk Drive (A:) and then SYS A: N:

Reply 6 of 15, by Zup

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Could it be possible to use PXE to serve that machine a boot disk that does the SYS command?

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Reply 7 of 15, by TheCoach

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DosFreak wrote:

In the DOSBox 9x guide thread I have a HD images for DOSBox formatted and partitioned with freedos SYS C: which are freely distributable.

You can install 9x on FreeDOS it will just overwrite the FreeDOS boot files with the MS-DOS versions.

Thanks i'll give this a shot.

Sammy wrote:

If your new HDD is Drive N: (for example) you should be able to mount a Image of a Boot-Disk in a Virtual Disk Drive (A:) and then SYS A: N:

If you mean via dosbox then no, this does not work as the boot disk boots in it's own environment and does not see what I mounted on dosbox before.

Zup wrote:

Could it be possible to use PXE to serve that machine a boot disk that does the SYS command?

I believe PXE is essentially boot from network, this would be a last resort as it is kind of overkill(interesting idea though).

Reply 8 of 15, by Jorpho

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TheCoach wrote:
M-HT wrote:

You could mount the whole disk in a virtual machine and make it bootable using virtual floppy.

I was thinking if I could somehow use DosBox BOOT command to boot up a win98se floppy with an actual hard drive mounted to SYS it, but I couldn't figure out how to get an HDD mounted AND do the BOOT command.

You can't mount an actual hard drive in DOSBox, if I'm not mistaken. However, it is fairly trivial to do so in a proper virtual machine like VMware or VirtualBox.

In DOSBox you can mount a hard drive image which you could then write back to a hard drive with the appropriate software. To do what you describe, you would mount the hard drive image as C, the boot floppy as drive A, and then use "boot -L a".

If all else fails there are tools that will let you manually write individual sectors to a given drive. "dd" from Linux is the most popular, but I wouldn't know the necessary syntax or what Windows equivalent exists. Far better just to use VMware.

Reply 9 of 15, by Leolo

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Don't know if you're still interested, but there's a little known Microsoft tool, hidden in the Server 2003 OEM Preinstallation Kit CD, that does what you want.

It's a modified version of SYS.EXE, and can be run under modern Windows operating systems (even 64 bit ones). It works only for FAT32 drives, though. Does not work with FAT16.

I use it to create MS-DOS 7.1 bootable USB drives easily. It works really well. (you don't need Rufus, nor the famous HP USB tool)

I'm not sure about the license. I guess it's illegal to post it here, but I can tell you where I found it in a private message if you want.

EDIT: I'll post here the SHA1 hashes, to verify the files if you search for them in google (I think they are old enough to be considered abandonware, though)

d6d930090658820333772a3a5a76af949d95f3dc ?SHA1*2003opksp1.iso (size 387819520 bytes)

0e63d1b5710131d1e3e715871ea86097bb3ff68f ?SHA1*2003opk.iso (size 395771904 bytes)

The first one is for Server 2003 SP1 OPK, the second one is the regular Server 2003 OPK without service pack. But the contents of both ISOs are almost identical.

The SYS.EXE file is located in the "TOOLS\X86" subfolder.

Reply 10 of 15, by jarreboum

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I believe doing an install in a virtual machine and dd if of the resulting virtual drive should work.

Reply 11 of 15, by notsofossil

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This is a trick I've used for laptops without a CD or floppy drive (such as netbooks and ultra portables).

1) Mount desired boot drive in another PC
2) Format as MS-DOS boot disk using the files from the Windows 98 startup disk
3) Copy Windows 98 CD install files to boot drive
4) Connect boot drive to target PC and run the Win98 startup disk DOS environment, then run Win98 setup.exe

I've used the above steps to install Windows XP as well, though I usually install WinME because it has USB Mass Storage support. Just drop the Windows XP CD install files onto the boot drive and run the setup.exe from Win98/ME. Do not overwrite the pre-existing OS install.

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Reply 12 of 15, by gdjacobs

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Windows XP can be installed from USB although it does require third party utilities to prepare the media.

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Reply 14 of 15, by crazii

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Leolo wrote on 2017-02-03, 00:52:
Don't know if you're still interested, but there's a little known Microsoft tool, hidden in the Server 2003 OEM Preinstallation […]
Show full quote

Don't know if you're still interested, but there's a little known Microsoft tool, hidden in the Server 2003 OEM Preinstallation Kit CD, that does what you want.

It's a modified version of SYS.EXE, and can be run under modern Windows operating systems (even 64 bit ones). It works only for FAT32 drives, though. Does not work with FAT16.

I use it to create MS-DOS 7.1 bootable USB drives easily. It works really well. (you don't need Rufus, nor the famous HP USB tool)

I'm not sure about the license. I guess it's illegal to post it here, but I can tell you where I found it in a private message if you want.

EDIT: I'll post here the SHA1 hashes, to verify the files if you search for them in google (I think they are old enough to be considered abandonware, though)

d6d930090658820333772a3a5a76af949d95f3dc ?SHA1*2003opksp1.iso (size 387819520 bytes)

0e63d1b5710131d1e3e715871ea86097bb3ff68f ?SHA1*2003opk.iso (size 395771904 bytes)

The first one is for Server 2003 SP1 OPK, the second one is the regular Server 2003 OPK without service pack. But the contents of both ISOs are almost identical.

The SYS.EXE file is located in the "TOOLS\X86" subfolder.

Wow, that sounds very cool, I was planning to buy a XP laptop without CD/floppy drive and without USB-boot BIOS support. I want to replace XP with 98 and have made some plans i.e. buy external CD drive, and for now this one is most worth trying.
Just one question: Does it have the privilege to write the system partition i.e. SYS C: to overwrite the XP boot? I'm afraid its protected by the system and the operation may fail.

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Reply 15 of 15, by gerry

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interesting, what i'd though of doing is to create a bootable SD or CF card which will serve as HDD for a system. I thought of using rufus or something to prep it , maybe i'll try it. Up until now it's always been easy enough to use a fdd boot disk