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

[Mike Stein]

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
>