Dos Problem

[Anonymous]

Hey,

I used the tool provided on this site to make the dos boot disk, and all is good, except I can't get into c:\ using this newer computer.

Help thanks!

- Andrew

[mika]

Lemme guess ... your C: is partitioned with NTFS?

[Petter1979]

Yeah as mentioned you cant see NTFS formatted drives in dos, try if you have room format a partition/drive with Fat32, and use that partition/drive for your old games.

[FreeFreddy]

And you also could install Windows 98 there for more sure possibility to play really all old games. But when you have Windows XP already installed as first operating system, it's pretty difficult to install Windows 98 without damaging files and stability. If you need help then, PM me and I'll write you the way how it can be done. ;)

[gregor]

or you can simply make DOS partition with FAT 16 or whatever it was called. (why would he need a win98 to play DOS games?)
then you will have a computer ready for dos games. if it's too fast for some games you can use slowdown programes (like moslo).

[FreeFreddy]

Originally posted by gregor@Sep 20 2004, 07:19 PM
or you can simply make DOS partition with FAT 16 or whatever it was called. (why would he need a win98 to play DOS games?)
Hehe, well, you know: Ms-Dos doesn't support more than 1 GB of harddisk space. So with today's HD's you'll need at least Windows 98 to be able to access more space. And 1 GB is not enough to put all the old games on it. ;)

[Data]

fat16 supported up to 2 gb :-) not 1
still not enough though
with a msdos 7.0 (win98) bootdisk you can try fat32
that one goes to 25 gb

[gregor]

i still don't see a problem..
one can have a lot of different operating systems and file systems.

but if you have 1 dos and 1 XP it should be enough. even if dos is less then 2gb it's enough to play older games. you can have them saved on XP and then copy them to dos partiton.


my HDD is small for todays measures ( 10 GB). yet i have 3 partitions. WIN98 boot partition (has basic programs loaded on), WIN98 partition for files and another partition for Linux system. i was thinking of creating a FAT 16 partition as well. i would give arround 200MB for it. should be more than enough to run most DOS games.

[Guest]

FAT32 goes up to 32GB actually, but for old games you really don't need near that much. Even 1GB is huge for these old games; you can probably install a thousand of them with that much space. :D

[Guybrush]

Maximum Partition Sizes:

FAT16 - 2 Gigabytes
FAT32 - 2 Terabytes
NTFS - 16 Exabytes

However even using FAT32 Windows was limited to 137GB until Windows XP SP1 added support for 48-bit LBA. However I am willing to bet that would be more than enough to play old DOS games. I am running XP and I have a 600MB FAT16 partition for my old games. I use an MS-DOS 6.21 boot disk with my SoundBlaster Live! SB16 emulation drivers on it. Even with hundreds of games there is plenty of space available. :)

Keep in mind that if you do set up a FAT partition for your games, when you boot from your floppy disk it is going to show up as drive C: even if it is labeled as H: by XP. This will be the only partition visible to DOS so you won't have to worry about messing up your installation of Windows.

[mika]

Look, it doesn't matter how large you partition your drive, only that it is either FAT16 (in case of pure DOS - pre Win98) or FAT32 (in case of win98). The fact is that DOS does not see the NTFS partitions so it cannot see a harddrive.

[Eagle of Fire]

We are talking about OLD DOS games, isn't? You know, those who used to have at max 10 floppies disk of 1.4 megs each?????

How would one gig not be enough? :rolleyes:

For newer games who fit on CD, you can probably manage to make them run on Win98 with very few problems.

[Kon-Tiki]

I'm using Win98SE myself and have trouble booting any of these games on it. Am trying to get this P1 working, using my old 4GB HD. BIOS recognizes it, and it's the only HD that seems to pass booting with a boot disk, but can't access it either. Shall I hook it up to my Win98 comp and format it?

[Hobbs]

One thing to note on older PC's make sure they arent using a program such as EZBIOS, if you are booting directly from a floppy will not work, it will appear to start up and take you to an A:\ prompt but the C:\ drive wont be accessible. You have to let the PC begin to start and push a specific button to boot from the a:\ drive then insert the disk

Programs like this were used to get around BIOS limitations and allow larger Hard Drives