How to enable USB drives in both Windows 98SE AND MS-DOS 7.1.

[Grant Taylor]

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-MS-DOS-and-Win98.htm

Thank you for sharing.

I'm filing that away for future use.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die