13 Mar
2006
13 Mar
'06
11:04 p.m.
On Monday 13 March 2006 05:35 pm, Jules Richardson wrote:
Another DOS question! :)
I've got a laptop that currently has Win2k and Debian Linux on it, along
with a small FAT partition (it's actually FAT32 currently, but I can change
that easily enough)
I want to put MSDOS on the FAT partition and triple-boot the machine - but
the laptop has no floppy drive on it, so I can't just boot from a DOS
floppy and run SYS that way.
So is there a way of putting the necessary files on there from either
Windows or Linux such that DOS will boot? Can't remember how MSDOS does
it's boot process now, but I assume that certain files (io.sys for one)
need to be in certain locations on the FAT partition or something?
DOS needs three files to boot, command.com, io.sys, and msdos.sys. Those
last two are given different names if we're talking about IBM's version. In
earlier versions of dos they needed to be the first files on the drive, but
I think that this requirement went away at some point, though I couldn't
say for sure when that happened.
At one point I would have known how to do this, but
the info's long since
fallen out of my brain...
I know what you mean. :-)
(Currently I'm booting Debian / Win2k from Grub -
it should handle booting
MSDOS too though).
Before I shoot myself in the foot, are there any other gotchas (like MSDOS
needing to be the first partition on the drive or anything nuts like that)?
The FAT partition is about 2GB into the disk - I seem to recall that a FAT
partition can't be more than 2GB in size, but presumably providing the BIOS
can see the whole disk DOS won't care about the offset to the start of the
partition?
That sounds reasonable to me, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. :-)
Most of what I did under dos back when was on way smaller drives...
(All I actually want to do is put Slackware Linux on
the machine there in
place of Debian, but the CDROM drive's too flakey to boot from. If I can
get MSDOS on there by copying from a remote machine then I can boot the
Slackware installer from MSDOS and then install the rest of Slackware
across the network - talk about complicated!!)
Hmm. There oughta be some easier way. Ever played with tomsrtbt? Worth a
try, anyhow.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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