My apologies if this question has been posed before - I did my best digging up old topics but the search returned thousands upon thousands of results about MS DOS itself, not 7.X.

My question is as follows:

My HP Vectra has support for very large drives but DOS 6.22 only supports partitions of 2GB. This seems ample but FAT16 also has the annoying side affect of taking up loads more space than needed due to the way it handles small files on large partitions. Since the system is designed with swappable Compact Flash cards (with a bracket around the back for easy access), I got the idea to have one CF card with DOS 6.22 for those games that don't work under DOS 7.X, and one with DOS 7.X.

The thing is, however, that I have no need for Windows 95 or 98. This is a Pentium 75 so any Win 9X system will run too slow to be usable and I have a much more suitable Pentium 233 MMX for that. On my P 233 MMX, rebooting to DOS is an annoying inconvenience so ideally I'd like MS DOS 7.X to work without any Windows 9X component. I googled a bit and found MS DOS 7.1 which is a stand-alone version someone made but found very little info on how compatible it is with the actual MS DOS 7.10:

https://www.wikihow.com/Install-MS-DOS-7.1

Anyone have any advice here? For me, compatibility is very important.