Creating a DOS boot partition on a WinXP machine

[jimi]

Hi

I have WinXP installation on the primary partition of my drive (80GB
partitioned into 40GB/20GB/20GB). The 40GB partition (which has winXP
on it) is in NTFS. The two 20GB are FAT32. This is what I would like:

- Dual boot winXP Prof (on the 40GB) and MS-DOS (on one of the 20GB).
- The XP partition must be NTFS and the DOS partition FAT32.
- Both OS's should ideally see their boot partitions as C:
- If possible, I'd like the DOS version to be 7 (win98) but I have
MS-DOS 6.22 disks too if I can't install 7 as a stand-alone OS.
- DOS doesn't have to see the NTFS drive (I know it doesn't natively
support this) but it must see both FAT32 drives, and XP must see all 3
drives.
- The DOS boot is for old DOS apps and games which don't work so well
under XP, so using the XP DOS box etc is not suitable.

My big problem comes in that WinXP is already installed so I'd like to
be able to do this without uninstalling XP.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Jimi

 

[Derek Turner]

Hi

I have WinXP installation on the primary partition of my drive (80GB
partitioned into 40GB/20GB/20GB). The 40GB partition (which has winXP
on it) is in NTFS. The two 20GB are FAT32. This is what I would like:

- Dual boot winXP Prof (on the 40GB) and MS-DOS (on one of the 20GB).
- The XP partition must be NTFS and the DOS partition FAT32. no problems so far
- Both OS's should ideally see their boot partitions as C: they will
- If possible, I'd like the DOS version to be 7 (win98) but I have
MS-DOS 6.22 disks too if I can't install 7 as a stand-alone OS.

6.22 won't see FAT32, it would have to be FAT16
of course you can install DOS7 without windows: boot up with a Win98
floppy and do a
'>sys c:'

- DOS doesn't have to see the NTFS drive (I know it doesn't natively
support this) but it must see both FAT32 drives, and XP must see all 3
drives.

in that case it will have to be win95b or later

- The DOS boot is for old DOS apps and games which don't work so well
under XP, so using the XP DOS box etc is not suitable.

My big problem comes in that WinXP is already installed so I'd like to
be able to do this without uninstalling XP.

to be bootable win9x MUST be on the first partition. I take it from what
you say that XP now happily resides in the 40gig which is the first
partition? Unless you use something like Partition Magic to move them
around, it ain't going to happen.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

1. boot from a floppy when you want to use DOS - it will completely
ignore the XP partition.
2. get another drive (old and slow as you like) as primary and put DOS7
on that move the 80gig to secondary. Put a 3rd party boot manager in the
DOS disk.

 

[Ron Sommer]

use is BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com
($35 shareware - 30 day full functional trial)

 

[melter]

Hi

I have WinXP installation on the primary partition of my drive (80GB
partitioned into 40GB/20GB/20GB). The 40GB partition (which has winXP
on it) is in NTFS. The two 20GB are FAT32. This is what I would like:

- Dual boot winXP Prof (on the 40GB) and MS-DOS (on one of the 20GB).
- The XP partition must be NTFS and the DOS partition FAT32.
- Both OS's should ideally see their boot partitions as C:
- If possible, I'd like the DOS version to be 7 (win98) but I have
MS-DOS 6.22 disks too if I can't install 7 as a stand-alone OS.
- DOS doesn't have to see the NTFS drive (I know it doesn't natively
support this) but it must see both FAT32 drives, and XP must see all 3
drives.
- The DOS boot is for old DOS apps and games which don't work so well
under XP, so using the XP DOS box etc is not suitable.

My big problem comes in that WinXP is already installed so I'd like to
be able to do this without uninstalling XP.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Jimi

I think "System Commander" will give you a wizard for installing OS' and
multi-booting between them...

 

[jdk]

Hi

I have WinXP installation on the primary partition of my drive (80GB
partitioned into 40GB/20GB/20GB). The 40GB partition (which has winXP
on it) is in NTFS. The two 20GB are FAT32. This is what I would like:

- Dual boot winXP Prof (on the 40GB) and MS-DOS (on one of the 20GB).
- The XP partition must be NTFS and the DOS partition FAT32.
- Both OS's should ideally see their boot partitions as C:
- If possible, I'd like the DOS version to be 7 (win98) but I have
MS-DOS 6.22 disks too if I can't install 7 as a stand-alone OS.
- DOS doesn't have to see the NTFS drive (I know it doesn't natively
support this) but it must see both FAT32 drives, and XP must see all 3
drives.
- The DOS boot is for old DOS apps and games which don't work so well
under XP, so using the XP DOS box etc is not suitable.

My big problem comes in that WinXP is already installed so I'd like to
be able to do this without uninstalling XP.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks
Jimi

1. Dos 6.x and older can't read FAT32 let alone NTFS and is limited
(without hacking the actual code) to booting from C: (1st partition of
drive 0 Of course its only hard drive option of FAT16 is limited to a
max of a 2GB partition size and terribly wasteful of disk space over
700MG or so. Been there done that - for a real long time.

2. Win98 can't read or boot from NTFS. At best the NTFS C: drive you
have will require a 3rd party boot loader capable of booting from NTFS.
That assumes of course that the W98 install floppy & CD will be able to
see *any* hard drive real estate beyond the NTFS C: partition without
doing things to XP that you won't like. I believe you said C: is 40GB?
the W98 installer starts out as 16 bit DOS, doubtful, very doubtful.
Been there as well.

3. I know of no third party software that can truly make a partition or
drive totally disappear from the eyes of an OS. They can trick an OS
into thinking they are inaccessible by temporarily changing the
partition type identifier in the partition table. But they are still
accounted for in boot order because an OS reads the BIOS directly and
doesn't defer to some 3rd party software for hardware information. Done
that too.

Three strikes and your out.

Your best bet is to start over, reformat and install W98 to C: (FAT32)
and XP (NTFS) to whatever other partition or drive you want. Just don't
put them in the same partition. XP will provide a boot loader (located
in C for you so you don't need 3rd party software.

John

ps: All MS OS's old and new must boot from a primary and most are
inordinately fond of C: To boot at all that primary must be the active
partition on the drive.

 

[Ron Sommer]

1. Dos 6.x and older can't read FAT32 let alone NTFS and is limited
(without hacking the actual code) to booting from C: (1st partition of
drive 0 Of course its only hard drive option of FAT16 is limited to a
max of a 2GB partition size and terribly wasteful of disk space over
700MG or so. Been there done that - for a real long time.

2. Win98 can't read or boot from NTFS. At best the NTFS C: drive you
have will require a 3rd party boot loader capable of booting from NTFS.
That assumes of course that the W98 install floppy & CD will be able to
see *any* hard drive real estate beyond the NTFS C: partition without
doing things to XP that you won't like. I believe you said C: is 40GB?
the W98 installer starts out as 16 bit DOS, doubtful, very doubtful.
Been there as well.

3. I know of no third party software that can truly make a partition or
drive totally disappear from the eyes of an OS. They can trick an OS
into thinking they are inaccessible by temporarily changing the
partition type identifier in the partition table. But they are still
accounted for in boot order because an OS reads the BIOS directly and
doesn't defer to some 3rd party software for hardware information. Done
that too.

Three strikes and your out.

Your best bet is to start over, reformat and install W98 to C: (FAT32)
and XP (NTFS) to whatever other partition or drive you want. Just don't
put them in the same partition. XP will provide a boot loader (located
in C for you so you don't need 3rd party software.

Reloading XP will be a lot of work.
If you install XP to D:, then decide that you want to put XP back on C:, you
will again have a lot of work.

Bootitng can easily have 4 primary partitions, so you can have 4 separate
operating systems.
The Bios passes control to Bootitng, then you decide which partition to
boot.

You can add a larger hard drive than the Bios can handle by using a
controller card. Here again the Bios passes control to the controller card.

So, the Bios is not the limiting factor that your answer implies.

 

[I'm Dan]

...(snipped)...
3. I know of no third party software that can truly make a partition
or drive totally disappear from the eyes of an OS. They can trick
an OS into thinking they are inaccessible by temporarily changing
the partition type identifier in the partition table. But they are still
accounted for in boot order because an OS reads the BIOS
directly and doesn't defer to some 3rd party software for hardware
information. Done that too.
...(snipped)...

Generally valid advice to the OP (which I haven't repeated here), but
just FTR, there are a few third-party boot managers that can make a
partition totally disappear. What you describe is the typical way to
"hide" partitions, but BootIt NG (www.bootitng.com) and Ranish Partition
Manager (www.ranish.com/part) can optionally be installed in a manner
which doesn't list the secret partitions in the real partition table.
They maintain their own proprietary list of partitions and fill the real
partition table on the fly with only the partitions you want the OS to
see. When the OS boots, it will think the space occupied by the secret
partition is unallocated free space because there is no partition table
entry for that space . . . which means that once you use these
proprietary techniques, you must be careful to not use other tools
(PartitionMagic, fdisk, diskpart, et al) because they'll think the
secret space really is unallocated.

 

[I'm Dan]

I have WinXP installation on the primary partition of my drive
(80GB partitioned into 40GB/20GB/20GB). The 40GB partition
(which has winXP on it) is in NTFS. The two 20GB are FAT32.
This is what I would like:

- Dual boot winXP Prof (on the 40GB) and MS-DOS (on one
of the 20GB).
- The XP partition must be NTFS and the DOS partition FAT32.
- Both OS's should ideally see their boot partitions as C:
- If possible, I'd like the DOS version to be 7 (win98) but I have
MS-DOS 6.22 disks too if I can't install 7 as a stand-alone OS.
- DOS doesn't have to see the NTFS drive (I know it doesn't
natively support this) but it must see both FAT32 drives, and
XP must see all 3 drives.
- The DOS boot is for old DOS apps and games which don't
work so well under XP, so using the XP DOS box etc is not
suitable.

My big problem comes in that WinXP is already installed so
I'd like to be able to do this without uninstalling XP.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

As others have pointed out, DOS 6.22 won't work because it can't see
FAT32, but in addition, DOS 6.22 can't switch to LBA addressing like
DOS7/Win98 can, so it would have to live in a partition below the 8GB
boundary (meaning you'd have to move the DOS partition in front of the
NTFS partition).

Assuming part-2 is a primary partition, get a Win98 boot floppy (from
www.bootdisk.com, if you need to). Boot from the floppy and it should
ignore part-1, part-2 & 3 should be assigned C: and D:. Execute the
command "sys c:" and make sure part-2 is set "active" (with fdisk, or
better yet, PartitionMagic). The HDD should now be able to boot
straight to part-2 and leave you at the C:\> prompt. To get a fully
functional DOS7 system, you can copy the following files from a working
Win98 system: all files in c:\windows\command\*.*, plus himem.sys,
emm386.exe, and smartdrv.exe from c:\windows.

Finally, add a third-party boot manager so you can choose between XP and
DOS -- XOSL, GAG, BootIt NG, Boot Magic, System Commander, et al.

 

[William Hanson]

Your best bet is to start over, reformat and install W98 to C: (FAT32)
and XP (NTFS) to whatever other partition or drive you want. Just don't
put them in the same partition. XP will provide a boot loader (located
in C for you so you don't need 3rd party software.

John

ps: All MS OS's old and new must boot from a primary and most are
inordinately fond of C: To boot at all that primary must be the active
partition on the drive.

The easiest fix I can think of is snagging a 2nd hard drive - he can
probably get a 4GB for free or next to it. The DOS 6.2 or 7 could be on
it. That's how one of my systems is set up; Win98 and Linux are on disk 1;
DOS is on disk 2, with disk 2 partitioned into 2GB FAT16 chunks so DOS can
deal with it.

 

[Plato]

Please dont feed the troll.

 

[jdk]

Generally valid advice to the OP (which I haven't repeated here), but
just FTR, there are a few third-party boot managers that can make a
partition totally disappear. What you describe is the typical way to
"hide" partitions, but BootIt NG (www.bootitng.com) and Ranish Partition
Manager (www.ranish.com/part) can optionally be installed in a manner
which doesn't list the secret partitions in the real partition table.
They maintain their own proprietary list of partitions and fill the real
partition table on the fly with only the partitions you want the OS to
see. When the OS boots, it will think the space occupied by the secret
partition is unallocated free space because there is no partition table
entry for that space . . . which means that once you use these
proprietary techniques, you must be careful to not use other tools
(PartitionMagic, fdisk, diskpart, et al) because they'll think the
secret space really is unallocated.

As you stated, the partition isn't hidden just not recognized as such.
Frankly I see no benefit, the disk space doesn't disappear but is just
masked in a different manner. Temporarily modifying one or two bytes in
the partition table is dangerous but correctable, replacing it with who
knows what is another thing entirely and not something I would advocate.

John