06-18-2003, 04:52 PM
This may help a lot of people.
Start from a W9x environment. Create a bootable Dos floppy, i.e. with the IO.sys and MSdos.sys files. This can be made from the Windows explorer.
Copy on the floppy the following files:
KEYB.COM
FDISK.EXE
FORMAT.COM
SYS.COM
CHKDSK.EXE
KEYBOARD.SYS
ATTRIB.EXE
MEM.EXE
You may copy some moe, but these files are the useful ones.
Then come the hard stuff : you have to re-format your hard drive. Save your data first ! Then, while formating either from a Windows install CD or better, from a Linux distribution, save 128 Mbytes for a dos partition, with a FAT32 file system : both Windows and Linux will thus read it.
I personnally highly recommand using a Linux Fdisk to do so, then you will get Lilo or Grub for the multi-boot. The best solution is clearly to start from a Mandrake distribution.
When this is done, re-boot from the Dos floppy, and just type SYS X:, where X: is th name of the dos partition (for example, you may have C: as the main XP NTFS partition, D: as the CD-Rom drive, E: as the NTFS partition, F: as the dos partition, etc...
Copy the files from the floppy to the dos partition, and create an autoexec.bat file with a text editor that you will place on the do partition.
And that's it, you have a plain dos partition on your PC, fully compatible with QB...
Right, I know this post will sound obscure to many, but I trust more people will contribute...
Start from a W9x environment. Create a bootable Dos floppy, i.e. with the IO.sys and MSdos.sys files. This can be made from the Windows explorer.
Copy on the floppy the following files:
KEYB.COM
FDISK.EXE
FORMAT.COM
SYS.COM
CHKDSK.EXE
KEYBOARD.SYS
ATTRIB.EXE
MEM.EXE
You may copy some moe, but these files are the useful ones.
Then come the hard stuff : you have to re-format your hard drive. Save your data first ! Then, while formating either from a Windows install CD or better, from a Linux distribution, save 128 Mbytes for a dos partition, with a FAT32 file system : both Windows and Linux will thus read it.
I personnally highly recommand using a Linux Fdisk to do so, then you will get Lilo or Grub for the multi-boot. The best solution is clearly to start from a Mandrake distribution.
When this is done, re-boot from the Dos floppy, and just type SYS X:, where X: is th name of the dos partition (for example, you may have C: as the main XP NTFS partition, D: as the CD-Rom drive, E: as the NTFS partition, F: as the dos partition, etc...
Copy the files from the floppy to the dos partition, and create an autoexec.bat file with a text editor that you will place on the do partition.
And that's it, you have a plain dos partition on your PC, fully compatible with QB...
Right, I know this post will sound obscure to many, but I trust more people will contribute...
hink Global, Make Symp' All ! ®