Re: [Qemu-devel] Old DOS under Qemu

[Hetz Ben Hamo <hetzbh@gmail.com>]

Hi Jeebs,

I just read your mail and decided to try to do what you're doing, only
I'm using Linux instead of Windows, and I'm using the CVS version.

I have tried the following OS's:

* IBM PC DOS 3.30
* MS DOS 5.0
* MS DOS 6.22

All of them are available freely (only the boot disks + some utilities
like fdisk, format, you know - stuff that will let you create
partitions, format and boot the system) at http://bootdisk.com

I used winimage (through wine) to extract some of the compressed boot
disks and create standard image floppies (so QEMU can boot from them).
I only did it with IBM PC DOS 3.3 image.

I created 2 GB hard disk (raw) with the command: 

qemu-img create msdos.img 2G

And I didn't use any special parameters when running QEMU. I used:

qemu -fda <floppy image name> -hda msdos.img -boot a

All of the above OS's recognized the hard disk (although DOS 3.3
recognized 32MB of it, if I'm not mistaken). I used the fdisk version
that came with each DOS to create 1 partition, format it with /s, and
then restarted qemu but with -boot c - to boot from the hard drive.

All of them worked perfectly. The only issue I had was with DOS 3.3
which didn't allow me to erase and/or use the DOS 6.22 partitions, so
I re-created it with qemu-img.

Mind you, I haven't really played inside (no himem.sys, no
autoexec.bat, no config.sys - just a bare boot which asks for date &
time).

If you want, I can send you a bootable hard drive image with only the
DOS boot (which means io.sys, msdos.sys, command.com) which boots
perfectly with QEMU. The attachment size is about ~2MB.

Thanks,
Hetz