BACK TO BASICS /b

[ElijahBaley]

I have a problem understanding something fundamental to installing operating systems:

My intention was to install DOS 6.22,Win3.1 Win95 and NT4 Workstation all on the same drive in one active primary partition formatted in FAT16 to create a multi-boot environment, in order to do some tweaking!

So I booted using the DOS 6.22 setup disk and selected F3 to exit to the a: prompt, I then invoked FDISK and created my partition, after rebooting I installed DOS 6.22 and removed my floppy disk and booted to DOS proper.

I decided to leave out Win3.1 and installed a CD rom driver to access my Win95 CD and began the setup.exe program, the installation appeared to be going correctly until I got to the first reboot, upon the reboot the O/S annouced that there was a problem intializing my "DMI" causing a windows protection error and that I would have to reboot.

of course, when I reboot, I got the same error.

Over the next 24hours I tried a number of variations on the theme, ie after installing DOS, booting with a Win95 boot disk but I always end up with an error of one sort or another.

I could really use a quick education in the basics of DOS and FAT, Is DOS FAT16 the same as Win95 FAT16?
Can I have the "full" version of DOS 6.22 sitting alongside Win95? - FYI, I am trying to install Win95 OSR/2 (should still be able to install in FAT16 ???)

Graham

 

[gunthnp]

fat 16 is not the problem it the same for both its the MBR that is differnt for dos, NT, 9x,NT takes over the MBR when you install it, and will let you boot to both but dos and win 95 are not setup to do that so you have problems with it to do it you need a program like boot commander which divids partion also even you don't have to. So long and thanks for all the fish.

 

[ElijahBaley]

Ah the old MBR, at one stage I did FDISK /MBR - I believe this ereases the Master Boot Record.

Ok it seems that this multi-boot scenario is not quite as simple as I had thought, in my investigations I have found what appears to be quite a good tutorial, I hope I learn something from it!

http://www.xperts.co.za/reuel/multiboot/multiboot.htm

Thanks

Graham

 

[edfair]

You can have 6.22 DOS and W95 DOS sitting in parallel, just have to use the version you have booted with. Requires you to have MSDOS.sys configured for menu operation and the directories separate. Also win31 and w95 into separate directories.
Have nevver tried the dual boot NT/95 but would probably go with a boot manager to keep things separate. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

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