Installing Dos with Disk Director

I have a question on Disk Director.

I'm trying to install Dos622 on a system running Disk Director suite 9.
I currently have XP Pro running on the system.
I have gone ahead and created a Fat16 partition on the hard drive.
Formatted it as Fat16.
Is it possible to install Dos622 on the hard drive without having to install Dos first and then re-installing XP pro.
My son has some old Dos games that he'd like to play and thats the reason I'd like to install Dos.

How would I do this?
I have the Dos622 floppies.

Any advise would be greatly appricated.

Thanks;
SteveC

 

Hi syc1959,

You will need to use Disk Director to resize and move your existing XP partition and create a fat16 partition at the very front of the disk. I have DOS 6.22 in a 600mb partition there. There is a maximum size limit that DOS can address. I think the maximum is 2gb. It is important that it be the first physical partition on the disk - before your XP partition. You may need to edit your XP boot.ini file afterwards to point to the correct partition in order for XP to boot. You should be able to use the OSS that is included in Disk Director to select DOS or XP on bootup but I am not familiar with the workings of that boot manager. I use Partition Magic's Boot Magic instead.

Once you have the fat16 partition at the front of the disk, you ought to be able to boot with the DOS install floppy and install DOS there. I don't know how DOS will work if you have LOTS of installed memory as most new machines now have. I have 384mb and it works fine with that amount. I even have Win3.1 installed on top of it in that same partition.

Before you start to manipulate partitions on an existing, working disk, it is prudent to make a disk image using imaging software such as Acronis True Image (or other similar imaging software) in order to have a means to restore your working system should anything go wrong in the re-partitioning process. I recommend you have such an image before doing anything else. You also need to have confidence in using the appropriate recovery CD in order to restore the image should that become necessary. Hopefully, it won't, but you should be prepared in case it does.

Rod

 

Rod;
Thanks for the reply.
Will do the partition move.
I have a image of the system, so I can get back to where I was quickly.
Thanks again;
SteveC

 

It should work, but I would make the follow recommendations:

1) Create a backup image of the entire disk before you proceed. Use TI or whatever imaging program you've used and tested. This way you can restore if something goes wrong.

2) Unless you have a very small hard drive (under 8GB), you'll have to move or resize the XP partition so you can create the DOS partition at the beginning of the drive. If you have any other partitions, they may need to be resized or moved also to make room. The DOS partition needs to be at the start of the drive like this:

[DOS622 1GB FAT Primary][XP Pro ??GB NTFS Primary]

If you only have the XP partition, then you should be able to just resize the start of the partition to make room in front of it. Then create the DOS partition in the unallocated space.

This is necessary because DOS can't boot if the partition starts past 2GB (or may 8GB, depending on the version). DOS's FDISK also will not work correctly on partitions at the end of large drives.

3) Before you install DOS, make sure the DOS partition is the Active partition.

Keep in mind, that unless you have an older soundcard (like a SoundBlaster 16), you won't have any sound support for games in DOS since most new soundcards (or built-in sound) don't support DOS.

----

Another option to consider is running the games is DOSBox. This is an emulator that runs in Windows and works pretty well on fast systems. It has sound support and you can control the speed of the program so even very old DOS program can be run when they would normally run way too fast.

 

That did it. I resized the XP partition, moving the forward part [begining of the disk], created a 500 mg partition, labeled Dos622.
Rebooted to the A drive, installed Dos622.

Didn't even have to edit the Boot.ini file.

Thanks;
SteveC

 

I found my DOS 6.22 disks last summer, installed them to a bootable USB flash drive. What a hoot! I had more fun reminiscing with the old OS. I especially like the help file in DOS 6.22

 

the old dos games are pretty cool nowadays.
I have a CD that has all the dos files extracted, so all I need to do is
sys the partition and then copy the files.
The system has a SB16 sound card and I have the dos drivers for it.
The big reason for trying OS selector, was so i didn't have to open the box and connect the Dos hard drive everytime.

Now I'll have to re-do this on his system and I'll be good to go.

Thanks;
SteveC