Using MSDOS

[Steve Wagner]

Good morning XPE community,

When using compact flash, it is becoming apparent we need to run legacy
utilities, such as fdisk, with MSDOS. Getting MSDOS into our environment is
the question.

Our target is an SBC. There is no floppy drive. There is one hard drive with
two partitions. The CF exists as another drive. We can connect a CD drive if
necessary. The hard-drive is formatted with NTFS and has XP-Pro installed.
The second partition is available for anything, such as MSDOS, and can be
formatted to whatever.

We need pointers to an MSDOS image and procedure how to install. We can use
Ethernet to get an image to the SBC, thumb-drive, or CD. We hope that MSDOS
could be installed on the second partition of the hard drive and be setup to
duel boot. If not, we live with whatever; we just need to have MSDOS running
somewhere with the CF viewable. If you have experience with installing MSDOS
without floppies and recognize a way to help us, we would certainly
appreciate it.

Thanks much,

Steve Wagner

 

[Lucvdv]

Good morning XPE community,

When using compact flash, it is becoming apparent we need to run legacy
utilities, such as fdisk, with MSDOS. Getting MSDOS into our environment is
the question.

Our target is an SBC. There is no floppy drive. There is one hard drive with
two partitions. The CF exists as another drive. We can connect a CD drive if
necessary. The hard-drive is formatted with NTFS and has XP-Pro installed.
The second partition is available for anything, such as MSDOS, and can be
formatted to whatever.

I you can't connect a floppy drive but otherwise what you need to do could
be done from a floppy, use Nero (or similar) to create a bootable CD.
Use your boot floppy as boot image for the CD.


I've just been trying (a day and a half of experimenting with boot sectors)
to make a USB stick bootable as an R/W alternative: I don't recommend this
approach.

There are several websites that say it's possible and explain in detail how
to do it, but I can't get it to work on my target hardware. I keep getting
the "replace disks" message as if I'm trying to boot a data disk (meaning
the boot sector is loaded and executed, but it fails to locate or load
io.sys).

 

[JustinH]

I you can't connect a floppy drive but otherwise what you need to do could
be done from a floppy, use Nero (or similar) to create a bootable CD.
Use your boot floppy as boot image for the CD.


I've just been trying (a day and a half of experimenting with boot sectors)
to make a USB stick bootable as an R/W alternative: I don't recommend this
approach.

There are several websites that say it's possible and explain in detail how
to do it, but I can't get it to work on my target hardware. I keep getting
the "replace disks" message as if I'm trying to boot a data disk (meaning
the boot sector is loaded and executed, but it fails to locate or load
io.sys).

I have just succeeded in getting a dual boot XPe/DOS setup to work, but
I had to do it from scratch rather than retrofitting to an existing
drive. Might be possible to do this the long way and then transfer the
boot procedure files to your existing image. The limitation may be
that the DOS partition needs to be reasonably near the front of the
hard drive (Apparently within the first 1Gb).
For what it is worth my procedure is as follows:

1) create a DOS bootable floppy and if necessary use Nero to create a
bootable CD in floppy disk emulation mode (I use FreeDOS so as not to
get involved in licensing issues, but make sure to use a kernel later
than 0.0.35 or you can get problems with drive letter assignments)
2) boot the DOS system and use FDISK to create 2 or more partitons.
The first quite small (I use 20Mb) as FAT16, Primary, Active; The
second large, FAT32 Primary for XPe. I also create a third data
partition FAT32 primary since both the first will be protected by EWF.
format DOS and XPe partitions with /s, format the third normally.
3) Add any additional DOS files that you need to the DOS partiton,
preferably in a sub-directory (I just need XCOPY and CHKDSK for
updating my XPe files in the field).
4) Install XP Pro in the XP partition. When asked 'keep the current
formatting'.
5) You should now have a hard drive which can dual boot into XP-Pro and
into DOS.
6) Build your XPe system, ensuring that the Boot partition size is set
to the size of the small DOS partition, and the pointers to the various
directories are set to D:... instead f C:.... Also inlcued Auto Layout
if you wan to use EWF.
7) Your XPe files will be have some files in the 'output' folder, and
the rest, including WINDOWS\ in a folder called D
8) delet all the files in the XP Pro partition on your target drive,
and copy all the contents of the D output folder to that partition.
Copy all the files in the main part of the target folder EXCEPT
'boot.ini' into the DOS partition.
9) boot to the XPe partition and run FBA as normal. The system should
now dual boot between XPe and DOS, and you can now configure the DOS
config.sys and autoexec.bat files as desired. In my system I then
enable EWF in disk mode for the DOS partition (requires very little
disk space) and in RAM mode for the XPe partition.
10) In my case (this is not required for the build but may be of
interest) I can then issue a system update DVD with a complete XPe
build on it (Post FBA). My program (in a headless system) replaces the
boot.ini file in the DOS partition with a one that defaults to DOS
rather than defaulting to XPe, and does an EWFMGR C: -commitanddisable.
It then reboots the system (which goes into DOS) where autoexec.bat
does a CHKDSK on the XPe partition and then copies all the new files
from the DVD overwriting the old operating system. A final CHKDSK for
security, and replace the boot.ini file with a new version from the DVD
which defaults to XPe, and then reboot to get back into a complete new
copy of XPe, all without any user intervention except to put in the
update DVD.

I know that this is not quite what you need, but I hope that it will be
of some help

Justin

 

[Microsoft]

There is an HP USB disk format tool that will let you create a bootable DOS
USB thumb drive.
The PC needs to support USB-HDD for boot.
I've don this before so I could run memory test programs or older dos
versions of Ghost.

 

[Lucvdv]

There is an HP USB disk format tool that will let you create a bootable DOS
USB thumb drive.
The PC needs to support USB-HDD for boot.
I've don this before so I could run memory test programs or older dos
versions of Ghost.

That's one of the methods I tried, and it didn't work.

The BIOS of the board it was meant for (an industrial Pentium M board) had
settings for booting from USB HDD, USB Floppy, USB ZIP and USB CD-ROM. None
of those settings worked with an USB stick.

Another board I tried (plain off-the-shelf ASUS P5GDC Deluxe) had 3
different USB boot settings: none worked.


I think in general, you better save yourself the hassle of trying and
failing. Forget booting from USB sticks until there is a real standard for
it that all new boards support and that works.

 

[Fenster]

That's one of the methods I tried, and it didn't work.

The BIOS of the board it was meant for (an industrial Pentium M board) had
settings for booting from USB HDD, USB Floppy, USB ZIP and USB CD-ROM. None
of those settings worked with an USB stick.

Another board I tried (plain off-the-shelf ASUS P5GDC Deluxe) had 3
different USB boot settings: none worked.


I think in general, you better save yourself the hassle of trying and
failing. Forget booting from USB sticks until there is a real standard for
it that all new boards support and that works.

I use the HP utility with a 6U, VME-compatible Pentium M-based PC (of
our own design) which has a General Software, Inc. BIOS.

Maybe the problem is related to the DOS that you use with the HP utility
or perhaps the MBR on the USB stick. The 'DOS' I use is Windows
Millenium version which I get from a floppy formatted on an XP Pro
desktop.

 

[Richard]

Steve,
Are you want DOS just for preparing the drive or do you actually need it as
a permanant secondary OS?

If it's mainly for preperation as indicated in your previous NG Posting
about partitioning then you may be able to do something like this....

Can you hook a floppy drive up just a single time to prepare your first
compact flash? You can download Dos Boot Disk from Bootdisk.com or you can
create a bootable disk from within Windows, then just copy over Format,
Fdisk, and anything else you may need. Then Run your BootPrep on it.

After that, you can use a USB Adpater if you want to simply copy files to it
after each build for Development.

 

[Sean Liming \(eMVP\)]

There is a utility called Remote Recover that can help with the download. It
uses MS-DOS networking to help establish a connection between host and
target.

http://www.winternals.com/Products/AdministratorsPak/Default.aspx

Microsoft now owns these tools.

Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
XP Embedded Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental
Toolkit
XP Training Class Nov 28-30 - http://www.sjjmicro.com/Training.html