Startup Disk

BabyEater

I am having problems using my startup disk i created .
I creayed it by going to control panel / add/remove programs / startup disk.
I am using this to put windows onto a hard drive but the pc says invalid systems disk.
Any ideas as to why this disk isnt working.
Tahnks

po0k

Win95, 98, 98SE, 2K, ME, XP? have you told the BIOS to use drive A: as teh first startup device? Is your wind0ze b0rked?
If not, reformat the floppy disk and try again
have to make myself another one of those again soon too.

BabyEater

it is win 98
and i have told the bios to use a:
and me windows is fine.
and i tried formatting the floppy

amen

Open a dos box
place the floppy in the drive
at the command prompt type
sys a:

this will turn your floppy into a bootable disk

beaver

Easier still, Dude... stick your CD in; tell your BIOS to boot from it. If your BIOS is recent (past few years) it should be able to handle this w/o problem.

-Ross

astrofool

floppy disks fail quite easily, use another disk if u already haven't tried that

or just try in windows explorer, right click floppy drive, select format and tell it to copy system files

BabyEater

Thanks for yer replies lads got it sorted

po0k

just on a side note, but still on topic imo, do any of ye have a quick way to make a DOS bootup disk that'll use the minimum of base memory?
if ye could say what files are needed on the disk too.
Would iut be possible to get MSCDEX to run and still have a fair wack of base ram left?

i just want to get Cannon Fodder working again. And a few others (ATF, MAgic Carpet etc.)

I'm also very unsure about networking in DOS. if I have the physical connection, get two games running and try and get them to talk without anything else will they do it?

I've not been fiddling with PCs long enough to have used DOS, so excuse meh

R. Daneel Olivaw

You should be able to get aroudn 610k of conventional RAM left if you tinker with the autoexec and config.sys enough.

You will most likely need:
MSCDEX (and also a .sys driver as well, depends on your drive, but MS have a generic one with the Windows CDROM)

Mouse driver

Sound drivers (SB have DOS emulation, which works great for me, even on an old AUdioPCI 128D mobo audio)

The biggest problem you will find is getting games to run that need to mess with real-mode, or 386 enhanced, etc., . Some games, liek Privateer and Ultima VII, even need the real old-school EMM386.exe from DOS 6.22 (for example) to run at all. Some games need to be runnin on FAT16 partition, etc., .

Classic Trash is a decent Abandonware site. If you search on Google you'll find more info.

I remember though from the immediate post-Amiga days and pre-WIndows/DirectX that you could easily have to make a special bootdisk for each game you wanted to play.

The easiest way to do it takes time: start with a basic empty bootdisk, then try and run the setup. It will tell you what RAM you need (either in extended or expanded mode (oh **** remember that!)), mouse, FILES settings, etc., .