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DOS ?

azazyel

azazyel

Diamond Member
Last night I finally turned my computer on. This is the first computer that I have ever built so of course I ran into a snag. Everything seems fine but for some reason it won't read my boot disk. I can get all the way into bios and the computer reconizes that the drive is there but it just doesnt' work. When I get home I will post the exact message but in the meantime is there an easier way to check to see if my 3.5 drive is pooched?

 
Does the drive light stay on? If so, be sure you have the floppy connected to the END of the cable and the correct direction. On some drives, you have to snap-off a section on the drive connector so the key permits the cable to be connected properly.
 
I don't think I would do something that careless. So, that is probalby what happened

Thank you!!!
 
Badthad-

You were right on the money, thanks. Now I have another inquiry. Because this is my first computer I wanted to do this the hardest way possible so I am going to install DOS 6.22. My question is, can DOS support a 30gig hard drive? When I ran the boot program for the hard drive it asked for the first disk of my OS so I entered in my DOS disk. It then partitioned my disk into 4 parts! So now I have drives C-F. This seemed a little wierd to me but nothing that I couldn't handle. My problem was when I was installing the CD-ROM driver, it wouldn't work. I figured it was because there were no more drive letters accesable for it. The only way that I could get it to work was to delete the other partions. But a weird thing is the CD-ROM became the E: even though the D: wasn't there anymore.

I doubt that I am making too much sense I have a pretty bad cold right now. But any help would be great!

Happy V-day.
 
In order to access more drive letters, put a line in your "config.sys" file that reads (without the quotes):

lastdrive=z

Now, why dos 6.22 and why would you want all those partitions on a 30g drive?
 
heheheh...loaded DOS eh? LMAO It would have been better/easier just to make a boot disk. You can get free bootdisks from HERE.
Sounds like you used the dreaded fdisk to prepare the drive, eh? Read this for my opinion:
Hard Drive Partitioning

Slik is correct, as usual!

[edit]Oh yea, click on my profile Icon and rate me please! Slik is kickin my arse in the ratings race, LOL.
 
To answer some of the snickers, I want DOS on my system. Otherwise it is really hard to run some of my old DOS based games like Wasteland. But I don't want that may partitions but DOS can't manage anything over 8gs so I am kind of in a crunch. Also, I feel safer with DOS there that way if everything gets pooched I can just go to the DOS ground floor and work it out.

I do plan to have windows as well but I have to install DOS first. So I have to figure out if having 4 partitions is worth it. Actually I was going to have windows and linux on this system and just use config.sys as a boot menu. I don't know what to do. But it is a lot of fun screwing arround with it.

Badthad---like the site!
 
Hey azazyel, I think it's great you love DOS...ME TOO! People today are too brainwashed by GUI OSes. Nothing like getting down to the basics. 😀

Glad you liked my website! Thanks!
 
Your best bet is to just install Windows and have a Dos Boot disk for your games, and to get to the command prompt to fix problems. This way you get around the Fat16 partition size limit, and you can always use the dos boot disk to take care of any problems...

If you go this route, you'll need to use Win9x's version of FDISK, say "Yes" to large drive support" when prompted, remove all existing partitions, create 1 (one) new Primary partition.

With this scenario, install Win9x, make a setup disk (boot disk), etc.
Remember, you can always hit the F8 key when Windows starts to choose to boot right to the command prompt. You can also have the boot menu appear at every boot up by editing the Win9x's version of "msdos.sys" (it's read-only, so remove that attribute first), and edit the line "BootMenu=" and set it to "1" (no quotes). This way the Win9x boot menu will always come up and you can choose to boot normally or right to the dos prompt.

Remember, too, that msdos has no support for Long File Names in windows, so you can totally hose a system manipulating files that way.
 
Once again, Slik is "da man". To emphasize this point - You have to be VERY careful manipulating files in 9x DOS mode. There is an article in the KB about this and how you can totally reek havoc on files. It does go on to say working within a DOS window is not a problem, just the DOS mode.

Ring a bell Slik? (I know he won't be able to resist this. Look for a link to the KB article from Slik soon...hehehehe. Payin ya back for that 9x ram question, LOL.)
 
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