Installing ms-dos from floppies

Installing ms-dos from floppies

[Jan Willem Stumpel]

Recently somebody gave me an old set of MS-DOS 6.22 floppies.
I am now running dosemu with MS-DOS 6.00 (just copied from an old
computer) but I thought it would be nice to try an 'official'
floppy install of 6.22.

I put the first floppy in the drive and called xdosemu -A. Then
soon, I was given the following options:

Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 Setup

    MS-DOS files cannot be installed on your hard disk
    because the format of drive C is incompatible with
    MS-DOS 6.22. You can have Setup reformat drive C for
    you, or you can exit Setup now and reformat drive C
    yourself.

    Caution: Reformatting will erase all files and
    directories currently on drive C.

          Format this drive (recommended).

          Exit Setup.

    To accept the selection, press ENTER.
    To change the selection, press the UP or DOWN ARROW key,
    and then press ENTER.

I am not very keen on having my "C" drive (actually my ~/dos
directory) erased completely. From a recent message by Bart I
doubt that this would actually happen, but I selected 'Exit Setup'
anyway.

Is there a simple procedure to install MS-DOS from floppies in a
working dosemu? Or do I just have to "expand" everything by hand?

Regards, Jan

Re: Installing ms-dos from floppies

[Bart Oldeman]

On Sat, 8 Apr 2006, Jan Willem Stumpel wrote:

> Recently somebody gave me an old set of MS-DOS 6.22 floppies.
> I am now running dosemu with MS-DOS 6.00 (just copied from an old
> computer) but I thought it would be nice to try an 'official'
> floppy install of 6.22.
>
> I put the first floppy in the drive and called xdosemu -A. Then
> soon, I was given the following options:
>
> Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 Setup
>
>    MS-DOS files cannot be installed on your hard disk
>    because the format of drive C is incompatible with
>    MS-DOS 6.22. You can have Setup reformat drive C for
>    you, or you can exit Setup now and reformat drive C
>    yourself.
>
>    Caution: Reformatting will erase all files and
>    directories currently on drive C.
>
>          Format this drive (recommended).
>
>          Exit Setup.
>
>    To accept the selection, press ENTER.
>    To change the selection, press the UP or DOWN ARROW key,
>    and then press ENTER.
>
> I am not very keen on having my "C" drive (actually my ~/dos
> directory) erased completely. From a recent message by Bart I
> doubt that this would actually happen, but I selected 'Exit Setup'
> anyway.

FD FORMAT simply fails on the "network" (ie. lredir) drive C:. It can't be 
formatted. I suspect that the Setup program does not like to install on 
network drives, so your only way out is to use an HDIMAGE via 
mkfatimage16 (see the man page) and specify that in $_hdimage.

FORMAT works on HDIMAGES -- because the low level stuff is skipped but 
also unnecessary unlike floppies: it just puts on the boot sector and FAT 
on the image. But mkfatimage16 already creates the FAT anyway.

Bart

Re: Installing ms-dos from floppies

[Jan Willem Stumpel]

Bart Oldeman wrote:

> FD FORMAT simply fails on the "network" (ie. lredir) drive C:.
> It can't be formatted. I suspect that the Setup program does
> not like to install on network drives, so your only way out is
> to use an HDIMAGE via mkfatimage16 (see the man page) and
> specify that in $_hdimage.
> 
> FORMAT works on HDIMAGES -- because the low level stuff is
> skipped but also unnecessary unlike floppies: it just puts on
> the boot sector and FAT on the image. But mkfatimage16 already
> creates the FAT anyway.

Thanks for this tip about mkfatimage16, but even using this I did
not succeed. I tried it as follows:

- in ~/.dosemu/drives deleted c
- in ~/.dosemurc put $_hdimage = "/home/jws/dostemp"
- called (from /home/jws) mkfatimage16 -k 60000 -f dostemp
- called xdosemu -A with the first ms-dos 6.22 floppy in the drive

Is this correct? I can't think of anything else, but anyway the
setup program did not like it. It said:

 Microsoft MS-DOS 6.22 Setup
 ---------------------------
          Formatting Hard Disk Drive

          Please wait; Setup is formatting your hard disk drive.

                 Error

          Setup cannot install MS-DOS 6.22 on your
          computer.

          An error was detected while formatting
          your primary hard disk partition.

          . Press ENTER to exit Setup.

The strange thing is that if you choose to "exit" and then call
"format c:" from a:, it works without complaints (but of course
this does not, by itself, install ms-dos).

Apparently the setup program does not recognise that the C: drive
is already "formatted", and you cannot make it skip this
"formatting" step.

Regards, Jan