DOS problem for you ol' skool kids

nobodythere

Got a DOS problem (I'll be brief). Upgrading isn't an option, it's DOS 6.21 and I'm creating a backup of it on a zip disk. To test it I put in a new hard drive and restored all the files, but it wouldn't boot, presumably because of a different boot sector. So I got a DOS 6.21 boot disk from bootdisk.com so I could do a 'sys C:' but the bootdisk won't recognise my hard drive.

Point of frustration here.... any ideas?

axer

what size is the harddrive?

jor el

How did you restore the files to the second disk if the bootdisk won't recognise it? Or did you unzip DOS to the 2nd disk when the first one was present?

If you can get the 2nd disk recognised when the 1st disk is in then just do a sys d: from the first drive. You'll also need to set the 2nd disks partition as active.

Another problem with doing a sys to a hard disk I remember with DOS was it didn't copy msdos.sys from one to the other properly. Make backup copies of msdos.sys and io.sys from the original first, or do attrib -h -r -s *.sys on the c: drive before zipping it up so it will put all these files in the archive.

is_that_so

You can get a bootdisk here. http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Capt'n Midnight

FDISK /STATUS to see what dos thinks of the disk

then into FDISK and check that the partition is set active

FDISK /MBR to rebuild the boot record and reboot
the SYS C: again

Stupid question - the partition is FAT16 and less than 2GB
if you made the partition in Windows 95 OSR2 or higher it may be FAT32

The utility BOOTPART is great for making drives bootable, but you have to see it first.

If you are still tearing your hair out, then put the drive in on it's own with master/stand alone jumper, then fdisk to wipe it, then reboot and then Fdisk to make new partition and set it active and then format c:/S to make it bootable. - when it is bootable you can then restore the data again.

nobodythere

That reminds me midnight, fdisk shows a primary partition but with no drive letter assigned to it. It was already recognised as C:. I used a windows boot disk to restore the files but I need to have the same dos version boot disk to do sys C: . If I have io.sys and msdos.sys is it only a case of fdisk/mbr to set boot record? Going the norton ghost way anyway. First HDD is 800MB, new one is 6GB

jor el

I don't think DOS will handle a 6G partition so you may need to make a few of less than 2G each. It won't be assigning a drive letter if the partition is too big so that could be the problem.

As far as I can remember, and it's been quite a while, you can get any disk to boot once it has MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS aswell as COMMAND.COM. You can set the first two as hidden, read only and system but I don't think it's actually necessary. Once the partition is marked active that should boot.

Here's how I'd go about swapping in your new disk:

Have the old disk as primary master and set the new disk as slave.
Boot up from old disk, run fdisk and select the 2nd disk.
Wipe any partitions on it and create new partitions of up to 2G each to fill the disk. Mark the primary partition as active. Exit fdisk and reboot.
Format the new partitions (d: e: and f: maybe). When formatting : you could do format d: /s to copy across system files.
Now copy everything from c: to d: with "xcopy c:\*.* d:\ /h /s" this should copy everything, including hidden files to d:
You might need to do sys d: again, but I'm not sure. Whatever, make sure that MSDOS.SYS on d: is the same size as it is on c: Sometimes it's different after a system transfer, if it is smaller just copy over c:\MSDOS.SYS to d: and overwrite.

That should be it, turn off, make the new disk master and boot. If boot fails do fdisk /mbr from the boot floppy and also make sure the primary partition is active as I can't remember if you can set this when the disk was slave.

nobodythere

It was to do with the partition size, thanks everyone