7 Feb
2018
7 Feb
'18
9:30 p.m.
Back in the W98SE days I bought USB sticks that came with drivers, so W98 has never been a
problem.
Another approach for DOS if the system has 'boot from USB' capability is to just
make a bootable DOS7 USB stick.
Stick in: DOS, stick out: WIN98/XP/VISTA etc.; transfer files to heart's content.
Excellent writeup; thanks, Tez!
m
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry Stewart via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
To: "Grant Taylor" <cctalk at gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net>; "General
Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2018 11:14 PM
Subject: Re: How to enable USB drives in both Windows 98SE AND MS-DOS 7.1.
I thought there were alternate config.sys and
autoexec.bat files that
were used if you chose to reboot to MS-DOS mode, and
possibly if you hit F8
and chose command line during boot.
Yes, the files you speak of are config.dos and autoexec.dos. These
confused me at first because I thought just as you did. I put the driver
files in there. However, those files seem to be associated with the
PREVIOUS MS-DOS version (if one exists) prior to installation of Windows
98, NOT the CLI of Windows 98 (MS-DOS 7.1). There is an option when
starting Windows 98 to boot to an earlier version of MS-DOS. If this
earlier version is selected, then config.dos and autoexec.dos are read and
processed as config.sys and autoexec.bat for the DOS boot. Otherwise, if
booting the Windows 98 (MS-DOS 7.1) CLI, these files are ignored and only
autoexec.bat and config.sys (if they exist) are processed.
Initially, I thought booting to the previous DOS install (in my case MS-DOS
6.2) would solve the USB problem, and I simply called up the older DOS
(MS-DOS 6.2) with the drivers using those *.dos files. However, I was then
crippled by only being able to use a USB drive with FAT16 and a small
capacity. I needed an MS-DOS 7.1 environment to give me FAT 32 hence the
config.sys "menu" system.
Terry (Tez)
On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 4:20 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 02/06/2018 12:58 PM, Terry Stewart via cctalk
wrote:
The title might suggest to topic is not vintage,
but the reason I did
this myself was to facilitate classic computer disk imaging.
I'd think that something from ~20 years ago is indeed vintage. (It's
closer to the 25 year old requirement for cards to be vintage, than not.)
Just not quite as vintage as some of the other topics on cctalk.
I?ve recently given USB drive capability to the MS-DOS 7.1 environment in
a Windows 98SE computer I use for the purpose
above. It was a bit of work
configuring the machine to ensure both the MS-DOS drivers and the Windows
98SE drivers co-existed peacefully.
Intriguing.
I figured that such was possible, but I've never tried.
I'm no Windows 98 guru (or MS-DOS guru for that matter) so it may not be
the most efficient or elegant of solutions.
However, it worked for me.
That being the case I thought I?d document what I did.
I thought there were alternate config.sys and autoexec.bat files that were
used if you chose to reboot to MS-DOS mode, and possibly if you hit F8 and
chose command line during boot.
Quick Google searches make me think that the MS-DOS mode files are named
config.dos and autoexec.dos. Then Windows will rename them when you select
reboot into MS-DOS mode.
Hopefully the article will be useful to others who might want to do this.
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2018-02-05-USB-in-M
S-DOS-and-Win98.htm
Thank you for sharing.
I'm filing that away for future use.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die