BloodyCactus wrote on 2020-07-23, 19:55:

remember if your running 2gb with dos your running massive cluster sizes which just waste space. if your running ONLY dos and not windows, 2gb is heaps of space. or 2x2gb or 4x1gb with smaller clusters.

dos games are tiny.

Also Daggerfall is over 500mb by itself.

That was the convoluted indirect way i can say how to get dos 7.1 and still follow the rules here.

Here's what I do......not sure how much help it'll be.....

For MS-DOS 6.22 I always use a 8GB drive or smaller. Anything over 2.1 GB is split into partiotions. My only drives with this setup are currently two O.G. NEC Versa 250 MB drive packs, and an 8GB Seagate. The Seagate on my desktop is split into 4 roughly 2GB partitions - OS, Apps, Games, Misc.

For over 8GB I use DOS 7.1, or FreeDOS 2.1 if I'm not using Windows 3.x. To use Windows 3.1x on DOS 7.1 with FAT-32 partitions you will need win3xstart.exe to modify DOS and/or Windows 3.1x to work together (3.1 uses some special Disk ops and won't work with FAT-32 out of the box, and if it seems any version of DOS above 6.22 or not Microsoft/IBM branded it gets grumpy as well).

Most of the time I use Win95 on up on any drive over 8GB.

I've been using the CDU distro of DOS 7.1 for years. It works great

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-23, 21:51:

I've been using the CDU distro of DOS 7.1 for years. It works great

In an ideal world, rather than distributing copyrighted files, somebody would have written a batch file to generate a DOS 7.x installation from a Windows 9x CD . That would solve all legal and file integrity issues/doubts .

darry wrote on 2020-07-23, 22:26:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-23, 21:51:

I've been using the CDU distro of DOS 7.1 for years. It works great

In an ideal world, rather than distributing copyrighted files, somebody would have written a batch file to generate a DOS 7.x installation from a Windows 9x CD . That would solve all legal and file integrity issues/doubts .

There is official patches that, io.sys, command.com. etc and just down load the patches and extract.

darry wrote on 2020-07-23, 22:26:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-23, 21:51:

I've been using the CDU distro of DOS 7.1 for years. It works great

In an ideal world, rather than distributing copyrighted files, somebody would have written a batch file to generate a DOS 7.x installation from a Windows 9x CD . That would solve all legal and file integrity issues/doubts .

No offense, but I really don't care about any of that. It works, and I use it. I totally understand that vogons doesn't want links to it posted here, that's fine, but there is no need to pretend it doesn't exist or work exactly as advertised.

I mean it's DOS, are we worried it's sending tiktok telemetry back to china? 🤣

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-23, 23:02:

darry wrote on 2020-07-23, 22:26:

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-07-23, 21:51:

I've been using the CDU distro of DOS 7.1 for years. It works great

In an ideal world, rather than distributing copyrighted files, somebody would have written a batch file to generate a DOS 7.x installation from a Windows 9x CD . That would solve all legal and file integrity issues/doubts .

No offense, but I really don't care about any of that. It works, and I use it. I totally understand that vogons doesn't want links to it posted here, that's fine, but there is no need to pretend it doesn't exist or work exactly as advertised.

I mean it's DOS, are we worried it's sending tiktok telemetry back to china? 🤣

I am not offended and I do understand your point of view . Vogons' rules not withstanding, when a legal alternative exists, which is the case here, I prefer to use it . Having a script would make that legal method easier for others, especially for beginners .

The other, let's say less legal, option is there for those who choose to use it, whatever their reasons . I am not judging, but I am not encouraging it either . As for the file integrity, I was more worried about viruses or trojans . I understand that this alternative "solution" has been vetted by many people, including you, so that mostly puts that worry to rest.

There is a way, I believe: compression.
Programs like DoubleSpace are not bound to the limits of drive geometry or FAT.
They just report a total capacity, I believe.
Similarly, network drives or virtual drives (assign.. ) might be able to provide more than 2GB (technically speaking).
Last, but not least, it is possible to hack the system files. This gives about 4GB per partition..

Large hard drives and DOS: DOS 7.x is the way to go. I believe PC DOS 7 and up do support fat32 as well, and are dedicated DOS, not linked to win 9x. Not tested myself but these should be able to install windows 3.1x without hassle.

To get a good DOS 7.x install I did this:
- boot any pc of VM with a floppy drive boot cd capabilities from Windows 98.
- get a floppy disk and use format b: /u /s (as a would become the virtual floppy to boot from)
- copy interesting tools to your floppy disk
( Fdisk, format, Scandisk, debug, xcopy, sys, edit, himem etc )
- insert the floppy disk into the target compete, boot it
- if necessary use fdisk to get fast 32 partition up to the desired capacity. Reboot.
- use either says c: or format c: /u /s to make the hard disk boot DOS 7.x
- copy the contents from the floppy disk to c:\dos and here you have the DOS folder..

You may also get the contents from the windows9x \command folder (on any installed version of win 9x) and copy to your DOS folder. This allows you to get a full blown dos 7. Although it does work, it misses a few things from DOS 6.22 that where implemented better in Windows 9x itself. Like Defrag.

About legal stuff: I do have a few original Windows 95 and 98 CD-ROMs and hardly use them. I get the install files onto a convenient compactflash card and install from there. Among with almost a gigabyte of drivers, so I don't have issues with not finding them.

Those who don't have an original cd will probably find over a dozen "abandonware" sites to publish them, as MS no longer gives a ***. Legality is questionable but for most people it works.

I recall there is also a GUI option to make a Windows boot floppy.
Windows 9x hid it in Control Panel -> System..

waterbeesje wrote on 2020-07-29, 22:08:

as MS no longer gives a ***.

Well, yes, so it seems. More so, they want to see anything prior Win X to be dead and forgotten lately.
Just like Intel, I think, they remove old references from their sites.
But unlike drivers, it's the old knowledge bases (KB) and patches.

I forgot to mention.. There are some more DOSes out there..
Paragon PTS DOS / PTS-DOS 32
FreeDOS
PC-MOS/386 v5
IBM DOS 2000
Caldera DOS
Real/32
Wendin DOS
Datalight ROM DOS
XDOS

In reality DOS 6.22 can read and write 64k cluster 4GB (Windows NT) FAT16 drives just fine, but it is not an official way, so use it on your own risk.

Cyberdyne wrote on 2020-07-30, 07:16:

In reality DOS 6.22 can read and write 64k cluster 4GB (Windows NT) FAT16 drives just fine, but it is not an official way, so use it on your own risk.

That's cool, thanks for the tip! 👍
Have to test that with my copy of NT 3.1 at some point.
Also, there's a patch for DOS 5 that allows more than 1024 cylinders to be used.
It can be applied to DOS 6.xx, as well, if the right hex locations are known.

See Re: Intel VS440FX refuses to boot DOS 6.22 from detected SSD
Re: Unable to see more than 2GB of my HDD
Re: Browsing a harddisk under DOS without using BIOS routines (INT13H)

I had a guy buy a cheap Micronics DX4 Computer in 1998ish, he had a 12gb drive ala drive manager using Windows 3.11 /dos 6.2

He was able to use the whole thing, my guess is you couldn’t swap the drive in another pc and read it but it worked for him

These days not sure if old disk managers that used to come with a drive are easily found but they seemed to still support 6.22 into the early 2k

Later versions of DR-DOS also support FAT32. You can in theory even use DRFAT32.SYS with other versions of DOS.

The legal status of DR-DOS (and "OpenDOS") is frustratingly opaque.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-07-23, 19:27:

Don't listen to the naysayers. "MS-DOS 7.1" is just Windows 98SE DOS with the Win9x branding and GUI integration stuff removed... i.e. it doesn't try to start Windows when you boot.

All you need to do to stop Windows from running at boot is change a line in MSDOS.SYS.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-07-30, 06:26:

I recall there is also a GUI option to make a Windows boot floppy.
Windows 9x hid it in Control Panel -> System..

If I'm not mistaken, the SYS command works just as well, and also doesn't fill the disk with recovery utilities that you won't generally need. (WinME is different.)

Cyberdyne wrote on 2020-07-30, 07:16:

In reality DOS 6.22 can read and write 64k cluster 4GB (Windows NT) FAT16 drives just fine, but it is not an official way, so use it on your own risk.

Have you tried this yourself? I know NT4 can indeed use 4GB FAT16 drives, but I understood NT4 is the only thing that can subsequently use them.

In any case 64k clusters would likely be an extraordinary amount of wasted space.

tomexplodes wrote on 2020-07-23, 19:12:

Do partitions always need to be separate drive letters?

The answer to this is "yes and no".

Initially, a partition or logical drive needs to be assigned to a drive letter and formatted before it can be used. This is always true for DOS.

After that, though, you can use the JOIN.EXE utility (on the MS-DOS 6.22 Supplemental Tools disk) to mount a drive under a subdirectory on another drive. This is similar to the *nix mount command. After it has been mounted with JOIN, the target drive is no longer accessible via its drive letter. You can later unmount it with JOIN /D to put things back to normal. You would have to put the appropriate JOIN commands in your autoxec.bat to make them persistent.

Windows doesn't like JOIN.EXE much, but it's not a deal-breaker as long as you don't JOIN stuff while Windows is running. You can even switch between different versions of windows by JOINing different partitions to C:\WINDOWS.

JudgeMonroe wrote on 2020-08-07, 20:07:

The answer to this is "yes and no".

So that's a "yesn't" ? 😉
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yesn%27t