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windows me real dos stupidity

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wdegroot

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 19, 2006
Messages
132
maybe this is not QUITE vinatge.
BUT. and maybe I have too much time on my hands. I was going thry my bootdisks
and changing those that are strange self-extractors to a better scheme that lets me see what is in them.
I had previousy done 6.22
This time I started with win me.
I discovered that many were not working. A few worked but many and even the few I downloaded just did not work. THEN I ran into the lack or a real-dos mode. I installed ME on a 6g HD, and carefully applied the patches. IT still will not let me format a floppy with /s I do not really care about having a working ME system but is there a fix I do not know about?
is there a patched IO.SYS and Command.com ? I do not recall this from several years ago.
as I said this is not to use this OS
but I have most OS ( only 1.1 not 1.0)
 
Windows ME to my way of thinking was Microsoft's first major attempt to kill off MS-DOS for good. Microsoft even says that you can't shutdown to MS-DOS:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/262846

You can, however, restart to MS-DOS. All in all, I stay away from ME and stick with Win98SE.

------------------

A fix to this was circulated as modifying the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Policies\WinOldApp]
"NoRealMode"=dword:00000001

...and changing it to 0. I've never tried it.
 
Last edited:
wdegroot said:
This time I started with win me.
I discovered that many were not working. A few worked but many and even the few I downloaded just did not work. THEN I ran into the lack or a real-dos mode. I installed ME on a 6g HD, and carefully applied the patches. IT still will not let me format a floppy with /s I do not really care about having a working ME system but is there a fix I do not know about?
is there a patched IO.SYS and Command.com ? I do not recall this from several years ago.
Click to expand...
WINME will let you create a startup floppy disk with the system files on it which will boot to DOS 8 but it will not let you run the SYS command on a hard disk that does not already have WINME installed on it and it will not let you SYS a blank floppy. (Unlike WIN 98 and 98SE, which, coincidentally, I just did a few hours ago.) You can, of course, make copies of the startup floppy you made originally.
 
One or two of the floppy images I had or downloaded DID work. I took one working floppy disk and then hooked up the small HD and booted off the me floppy. it gave me a long error message saying it could not SYS the drive.

I took the ME install cd and installed the OS.
I then installed and patched the installed OS
Later
It would not let me SYS the floppy I later tried to format. ( obviously) even with A hd that was supposedly fixed..
YES during the install I made the floppy it wanted me to make. I recall in 98 there is a procedure to make a new boot floppy.
Possibly, I have gone as far as I can go and done all that I can do.
I STILL do not remember the " emergency boot disk" message. I was told it would appear.
It was a CHORE looking for and finding the patches.
 
stone and others
I stayes with 98se for a long time
My asus p2b mb slot 1 100 bus
would in some models take 768ram but I had 640
but 98 was flakey over 512 and requires a simple patch ( in atscii) and the board had a hard drive limit.
for the next few years it felt like falling down stairs carrying a piano. a short respite with a dell that developed bad caps and now a more stable HP.
I put both 98se and 2000 on another mb. I do not mess with this one, I find that PnP works much better with xp. but i installed ME to see if the patch worked.
 
I've got a system here with 1.5GB of memory running Win98SE very comfortably. Yes, it takes a few downloads to get things just right, but it's stable.

Do you want me to look into the WinME real-mode issues? I can't imagine that the differences are anything more than some malicious code Microsoft added. Heck, I know I have betas of WinME somewhere that might provide a hint.
 
Ah, Win9x real-mode. AFAIK Win9x's dependence on DOS helped DR continue their lawsuit against MS. OS/2 never depended on DOS, and while the JDA was somewhat painful, I am pretty sure DR was a much worse threat to MS than IBM was back in 1990.
 
It's been too long since I left ME for 98 again but I know in later versions like 2000/XP in the GUI if you right clicked a floppy and said format eventually they added a "bootable" checkbox that would make their newer dos version of the bootable floppy. Before that however the only work around I found was downloading a bootdisk from somewhere else and creating it with rawrite2.exe or some other disk image to disk writer.
 
OK, guys... in ME to generate a Startup Disk the sequence is... Control Panel - Add/Remove Programs - Startup Disk. It's just that simple. :)
 
Very few people know anything about ME as most people reinstalled 98SE in short order.
 
The machine next to this one is running ME right now. And I really like the Dangerous Creatures screen saver that it's got. I've tried to port it to other OSes like XP and Vista without any success. If anybody knows if there's a way to do this I'd really appreciate it.
 
I did :" all that"
meaning d.l boot dislks -0 some worked
and making a bootdisk from the iunstalled and patched me. I used the ,manual patch biut have nor used DOSFIX2.exe I have it.
still, I cannot make a boot floppy or format a: /s
like I did with w98.
It is hard to do as the video card does not like me or 2000 or 98
and I normally use the ytest system with xp
where ALL I need do is install the audio driver
( obsolete abit mb) It took a while before the sata cd driver popped up. now that works fine as well.
It will go back to NORMAL as soon as I remove the small hs and re-connect the REAL drive

I may do ONE morew thing experiment substituting io.sys and command.com from 98se.

there is ALWAYS "format c: "
"
 
If you don't want to go through the rigamarole of creating a startup floppy from the WinME choices, you can get to a simple boot floppy.

First of all, the IO.SYS that the startup floppy uses is not the same IO.SYS that the startup floppy creater uses. (They're even different in length). If you use the one from the root directory of your hard disk, it'll try to find and load the WinME GUI. There's a way to circumvent this, but it's not worth the trouble.

So, you have to use the IO.SYS that's found in \WINDOWS\COMMAND\EBD.

The FORMAT program in WinME has had the boot sector for floppies hacked so it won't load IO.SYS or MSDOS.SYS. You can format a floppy using any MS-DOS formatter from about DOS 5 onwards, up through WIN98SE. I suspect that the Win98SE FORMAT could be easily hacked to do the job on WinME. It's not necessary to FORMAT /S the floppy; the same boot sector is used whether or not you use /S.

So you take a formatted floppy (not formatted on WinME) and copy over /WINDOWS/EBD/IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS (which is just the 9 character string ",WIN98EBD". Copy over anything else you want from the /WINDOWS/COMMAND or /WINDOWS/COMMAND/EBD directory and you're in business. You certainly could write a batch script to do all of this.

My own experience of WinME GUI is that it's a pig compared to Win98SE. On a 233MHz P1 MMX with 256MB of RAM, it's incredibly slow.
 
Now, Chuck, my question is... how would you get a hard disk to boot from the WinME system like you just described above? Would I have to use the Win98SE format to do the HD or is it only the floppy Format routine in WinME that presents this problem?
 
Good question. I guess my next step should be to replace the IO.SYS on my ME hard drive (actually a CF) with the IO.SYS from the startup floppy and see if it can be made to boot into GUI with a command. The standard (non-recovery) IO.SYS loads instead of COMMAND.COM the file \SYSTEM\VMM32.VXD. You can copy and rename COMMAND.COM to this file and WinME will come up with a command prompt. Microsoft really took pains to eliminate hints of MS-DOS, but my feeling is that most of those pains are cosmetic and the basic stuff is still Win98SE under it all.
 
I'll be watin' for you to find the answer to this one cause I certainly haven't :) In the meantime I've got a drive with WIN98SE DOS on it since that system allows you to SYS a floppy or hard drive.
 
You're probably right especially since I've already used WIN98SE which also has FAT32 capability to get large partitions in a DOS-like environment. That's actually good enough for what I want to do.
 
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