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Install DOS 6.22 on an XThose

Malc said:
What are you using as a hard drive in your XT, Compact Flash ? If yes have you got a USB CF card reader and a suitable machine you can use to access / Read / Write to the CF Card via the USB CF card reader.
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I tried that myself, only trouble is that you need to boot DOS to be able create a bootable DOS 6 floppy (I think) and if its a 64bit CPU that's hard to do other than booting DOS in a VM - which is why I went the VM DOS and USB drive route. Now it would be possible to boot DOS in the VM and do a SYS C: directly to the CF card if you can add USB support for the CF reader to the DOS VM (there is a way: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1046069/yes-usb-drivers-dos). I tried that and although I got the USB drivers to load for DOS, I wasn't successful having the DOS VM ever see the CF drive - so I simply resorted to copying the essential files to a USB attached floppy drive and formatting the dist as a 720KB.

Mike
 
I have no experience with VM's, Never tried them, Don't have any 64bit machines either but this is what works for me using my P4 XP box, A USB CF card reader and CF card, I also use the following:

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool V2.1.8 ( SP27608 ) I can't remember where i got mine from but if you google it should get some results, When installed it creates a folder on your C: drive called " DriveKey " with 3 files inside, EULA, HPUSBF.EXE and HPUSBW.EXE, The HPUSBW is the windows version of the tool and the HPUSBF is the command line version which is my preferred choice.

Obviously you will need Dos 6.22 system files / Software, Someone posted a link to Dos Image files in another thread, You can use WinImage to extract the files to a folder on your hard drive or i use DiskExplorer which is free, The help file is in japanese though but not really needed.

Once you have used the HP tool to Partition / Format and copy the system files to your CF Card you will need to " Fix " the MBR to make the card bootable on your XT, You can either use a dos 6.22 boot floppy and run FDISK /MBR on your XT machine or i use a utility called MBRFIX on my P4 box, It's a command line tool and it's free.

*Disclaimer*
The HP format tool / MBRFIX utility's are pretty straightforward in use but if you goose your system don't blame me, On your own head be it :) As i said it works for me in creating a bootable CF Card with DOS 6.22 fully installed using my P4 XP box for use in my IBM XT 5160 running the XT-IDE BIOS.
 
I will be using the XT-CF ISA Card for my HDD once I get things all together and working…but I need to get a EEPROM with the XT-IDE Universal BIOS on it as I don't have one….
 
Shit, I don't know…been reading the XT-CF site and I can't figure out if I need to get one programmed or not….

I read through the commands, but not 100% sure if I needed a programmed EEPROM or not.

It says: You don't need EPROM/EEPROM programmer if you already have XTIDE card. XTIDE card can be used to flash additional EEPROMs (2864) that can be moved to EPROM (2764) sockets.

I have the XT-CF Lo-Tech cards, so not 100% sure if that works.
 
Did you buy the Lo-tech card fully built or in Kit form and you built it yourself, If you got the card fully built the eeprom will be flashed already, If you got it in Kit form and built it yourself you will have to flash the eeprom unless you stated you wanted the eeprom pre-programmed when you bought the kit or did you buy the board only and sourced the parts yourself in which case you will need to flash the eeprom. You will need to use the Lo-tech Compact flash utility to flash the eeprom on the Lo-tech cards, Xtidecfg.com can't be used to flash the eeprom on the lo-tech cards only to configure the bios.
 
I have them both pre-built, so great to know…..

I got the rest of the files and will give this a shot this week…

Once that is done, I can get the DOS install on the CF card…

Appreciate all the help!
 
nc_mike said:
If you have DOS 6.x on 5.25" floppies, then they are 1.2M density for which you a 1.2M 5.25" drive to even read to begin with and I don't think you can even get it on 720K or 360K disks. Of course you know that DOS also insists on booting up from the A: drive. I had the same issue a while back with only a 360K and a 720K drive on my XT. What I did was get a copy of 6.2 DOS on 1.44 3.5" disks. On my current Windows 7 machine I created a virtual machine (I use VMWare but there are others) and installed DOS 6.2 on into that Virtual Machine. Then I attached an external USB 3.5" floppy drive to my Windows 7 system and attached it to the DOS virtual machine. I then did FORMAT A: /T:80 /N:9 /S to format the 1.44 disk as a 720K disk and transfer the system while the floppy was attached to the VM. I then copies the essential DOS files I needed to book and prepare the XT HDD (FDISK, EDIT, etc). I then used the newly minted 720K DOS 6.2 boot disk to boot up the XT and used it to FDISK the hard drive, format it, again with the /S parameter, and then finally did an FDISK /MBR to get a master boot record on to the XT HDD. Then I made a new sub directory on the HDD called DOS and proceeded to copy the remainder of the DOS files into that DOS sub directory on the C: drive (I had to go back to my VM and use a few 720K disks to copy all 123 or so files to get all of the installed DOS files from the VM to the XT.

It was a round-about process but worked when all I had was a DOS on high density disks and didn't have a high density drive on the XT to boot or read them. Maybe someone else has a less convoluted way to do it, but since I already had a DOS VM set up on my Win 7 system and an external USB floppy drive attached it was the quickest way I had at hand at the time to get it done.

Regards,
Mike
Click to expand...

OK,

I am about to be at this point..

The drive is formatted and the fdisk /mbr is done

After I copy the files over to the C:\DOS folder...

What command do I run to do the actual DOS install? Or isnt there one?

I ask as all my DOS installs have been DOS boot disk, welcome to DOS, tell it where to install, and the progress bar goes by as it installs...you get the idea...

EDIT - Holy Shit am I dumb....setup.exe goes a LONG way!!

Installing DOS on the CF Card!

Thanks so much for the assistance, learned a lot and am in GREAT Shape!!
 
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I thought that booting off Disk 1 of a DOS 6.22 install set went into a setup program which should also be started by setup.com The setup program would do all the install for you.

If that doesn't work, you could redo the format command with a "/s" switch as in Format c: /s
or run the SYS C: command to install the bootstrap files to the hard disk.
 
Not booting off the Disk...I have all 6.22 Install disk files copied to C:\DOS on my CF Card..

Gonna run setup from there and see how it goes..
 
It won't work. The DOS 6.22 checks the label of the disk the setup program is on. The label is different for each floppy. You should just use SerDrive.

Heather
 
Smack2k said:
How have others done it? I read a bunch of people that copied all the install files over and then ran it...
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Why don't you just install it to another machine and then copy the installed files to your XT? :) :) :)

FWIW, you don't need 90% of the files anyway. You're never going to use them or need them for anything.
 
I think that is where I was confused….I had read it as someone had copied the install files and then run it from there…

But doing the full install and then copying them over makes sense to….I can give that a shot….
 
Smack2k said:
I think that is where I was confused….I had read it as someone had copied the install files and then run it from there…
Click to expand...

Apparently it is possible but i've never tried it myself, It just seem's a pointless arse about face way of doing it when easier options are available, Like Heather said the Disk labels are read on install via floppy's, IIRC you have to hack the dossetup.ini file with a hex editor and have 3 separate folders for each of the floppy disk contents with each folder having it's own label, I'm sure there's more to it but can't remember the exact details.
 
Can't remember what version it was (6.xx) but I'm sure that back in the day I installed DOS from a high-capacity floppy of some sort (probably an LS-240, but it might have been a ZIP - I had both).

All I did was copy all the files to a single directory and run setup. I seem to remember that the labels are checked only if the disk needs to be changed because SETUP can't locate the next file in the list. If it can locate it, the next disk is never asked for. Having said that, I was in a corporate environment, and the installer I was using might well have been messed with.

I might well be mis-remembering, as I haven't needed to do it for years (although that's about to change - I have no HD disk on the machine I'm bulding).

Guess I'll find out :D
 
The normal Dos 6x floppy install checks the disk label of each floppy, That is why if you copy all files to one folder on your hard disk and run install, You will get the " Please insert setup disk 1 in drive A" etc message, If you look at the Disk labels of each floppy, " Disk 1 " etc, Note the space, This ties up with the contents of the setup file, It's quite possible you had a custom setup file.

Actually now i think about it i seem to remember MSDN / Technet subscribers having 16-bit OS's on CD available to them, which included Dos 6x, and if copied to Hard drive could be instaled from there ?, It was a long time ago though.
 
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