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Dos 3.3 Question / Dos 5.0 Question

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Smack2k

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Been looking around the web for 360K images of DOS and found a few 3.3 and 5.0 images, but both have 2 disk images in them. I thought that there were 3 or 4 disks for the complete DOS set?

I am trying to find a 3.3 set that I can both install and also has the DEBUG utility on it so I can LLF my MFM Hard Drive. Anyone know if the 2 discs will have that?

Also, the files I have are either .360 or .IMG files. What is the easiest / best way to get these onto 360K Floppies? I have a 286 running with DOS 6.22 with a 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 drive on it if that helps as well.

Finally, I found a set of AT&T DOS 3.3 that has these on it:

atdos331.360: MS-DOS Startup Diskette
atdos332.360: MS-DOS Operating Diskette
atdos333.360: MS-DOS Supplimental and Installation Diskette
atdos334.360: MS-DOS AT&T Help Diskette

It said that the discs have DOS and some files for an AT&T 6300...could I use these on a non AT&T 6300 and the extra stuff just not be used or should I avoid it?

EDIT - Please Move to Software Thread if I posted this in wrong area...
 
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version 3.3 was indeed 2 360KB floppies, not more. Yes, manufacturers often gave additional disks with utilities etc but the plain, full dos 3.3 comes on 2 360 disks, or 1 720KB
 
konc said:
version 3.3 was indeed 2 360KB floppies, not more. Yes, manufacturers often gave additional disks with utilities etc but the plain, full dos 3.3 comes on 2 360 disks, or 1 720KB
Click to expand...
My DOS 3.3 is on three 360K disks:

1) Program

2) Supplemental

3) Enhancements.
 
Do you know if the Debug program is on the first two?

Now, I just gotta get the image files from a 3 1/2" floppy with the image files to a 5 1/4" 360K Floppy ready to use.
 
Thanks Stone / konc...in terms of getting the 360K Files onto a 360K floppy, I found an old post of mine for 6.22 that had this setup process:



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.



Gonna go through this process for 3.3 unless someone has another way I can try?
 
Microsoft did distribute MS-DOS 6.22 on 360K disks, if you sent in a coupon:

msdos360k.jpg
 
Can you use the Upgrade disks to install full version of DOS? I have 5.0 upgrade set, not sure if its 720K or 360K, but when I booted to Disk 1 I got the old Non-System Disk error....

Big fan of your Youtube channel as well vwestlife.
 
that would be great if I could grab that from somewhere..

I can just copy the other needed files after doing that onto 360K floppies and onto the HDD of the 5160 and be good to go...
 
I have a 360 k 5 1/4 drive installed in a pentium III system as drive A, the BIOS allows for this without doing anything special. The 3.3 zip file from my site has all of the files together so you can make a bootable disk with whatever combo of files you want move to the disk (s). The thread link listed above has directions how to move the boot files to the disk without having to have an image program, so if you follow the directions on this thread and you are able to attach a 5 1/4 drive to a modernish computer that's all you need to build a 3.3 boot disk.
 
Stupid Question, but wanna ask..

Once I have the drive all ready after using your setup to get the boot disk, boot it, FDISK, FORMAT, SYS, all that, when I go to copy DOS files onto the machine, do they have to be in the root of C: or can I create a C:\DOS Folder and put them in there and have the machine still boot to DOS from C:?

Dumb question, I know, but its been a while.
 
a person typically copies everything to c:\dos ... and you can create a file in the root dir called autoexec.bat to tell the system where the dos files are located. When a DOS system boots it knows to look for a file called autoexexec.bat

You do need command.com and the ibm bios files on the root. If you format the c: drive using

format c: /s

...the "/s" copies the files you need to the root to make the drive bootable.

Here is a typical simple listing of the autoexec.bat file, the path command tells the computer to look in c:\dos should a person type in a dos command from anywhere, so you don't have to have everything in the root directory.

@echo off
prompt $p$g
path c:\dos;

there is also a file called config.sys that handles other system set up, but just to get started keep it simple.
 
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I did your steps to create the bootable 3.3 DOS diskette and it didnt work...

I formatted the disk as 360K

I then copied all the files over (the attr.com and DOS Files)

ran the attr -S -H ibm*.com

Booted to floppy, got the unknown disk error on boot

I have all the files....but no luck. Wont boot to the disk

Or is it because I formatted the 360K floppy on a 1.2 MB Floppy Drive? Could that be an issue? How do I get around that?
 
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run chkdsk /v at each stage, report the results especially before and after you run the attr command. have you ever booted a disk with this computer/drive, how confident are you that the computer hardware is OK?
 
This may sound silly, but make sure you are actually using a 360K disk. If it has a label, it will usually say "double density" or "500 KB" (the unformatted capacity). It will also usually have a hub ring around the center hole.

Formatting a 1.2 MB high density disk to 360K won't work, as the two densities use incompatible magnetic media. Sometimes formatting a 5¼-inch disk to the wrong density will appear to work at first, but the disk will soon develop read errors and become unusable, or else you'll already encounter lots of bad sectors when attempting to format it.
 
billdeg said:
run chkdsk /v at each stage, report the results especially before and after you run the attr command. have you ever booted a disk with this computer/drive, how confident are you that the computer hardware is OK?
Click to expand...

I can do that and post the results. I am 100% confident the drives and hardware is OK as I have booted it to a floppy before when I had an ISA Compact Flash adapter in it

vwestlife said:
This may sound silly, but make sure you are actually using a 360K disk. If it has a label, it will usually say "double density" or "500 KB" (the unformatted capacity). It will also usually have a hub ring around the center hole.

Formatting a 1.2 MB high density disk to 360K won't work, as the two densities use incompatible magnetic media. Sometimes formatting a 5¼-inch disk to the wrong density will appear to work at first, but the disk will soon develop read errors and become unusable, or else you'll already encounter lots of bad sectors when attempting to format it.
Click to expand...

This could be my issue but I am using disks from the same set that I had used to boot to the ISA Compact Flash adapter before, and I know that worked, but I will definately check

Stone said:
FWIW, if you use that image file I gave you the link to you just restore the image to a disk and you're done. :)
Click to expand...

Stone, can I use a 6.22 disk to boot it up and then after I LLF and Format / Partition the Drive, copy the 3.3 files onto the HDD and have it boot to 3.3? Didnt know if the version difference would matter?

Finally..do you know if DOS Upgrade Disks are bootable?
 
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