Hey guys first post here. I’ve been having a hard time trying to install MS-dos 5 on my pentium 3 Dell Dimension xps t500. For some reason it just refuses to boot from the floppy even though i have the right boot disk. What am i missing? The floppy drive does indeed work i just don’t understand why it won’t boot off it. I have 512 mb of ram, pentium 3 and about 4 pci cards connected
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How to boot from floppy?
- Thread starter Bluremii
- Start date
GeoffB17
Veteran Member
So, when you try to boot, what happens? There are a number of stages to the boot process, and you should get some sort of message on the screen, and/or a sequence of noises from the drive as it tries to read and act upon the boot sector, then read and act on the bios, and then the msdos file.
How many disks have you got. I have a set of boot disks for MSDOS 5 and these comprise 3 disks, which are 730k DD disks, not HD disks. I'm not sure if it would make a difference, but what is your A: disk set as, it might be better set as DD and not as HD (1.44 Mb). Also, I assume that your BIOS is set to boot from floppy if there is a floppy disk to boot from.
Geoff
How many disks have you got. I have a set of boot disks for MSDOS 5 and these comprise 3 disks, which are 730k DD disks, not HD disks. I'm not sure if it would make a difference, but what is your A: disk set as, it might be better set as DD and not as HD (1.44 Mb). Also, I assume that your BIOS is set to boot from floppy if there is a floppy disk to boot from.
Geoff
Does it have a bootable CD? I burned the DOS 6.2 ISO image to CD and booted from that on my old PC. Worked just fine. Then transferred the system to the HD.
You'd have to set your system to boot from CD for this to work if you do have a CD.
You'd have to set your system to boot from CD for this to work if you do have a CD.
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
Try to enter the BIOS setup and toggle "Boot from floppy" as the 1st boot option.
I’m not at home at the moment but when i do try to boot, the computer checks the ram and does all that, and then it gives me a cmos error which is fine i’m sure but then when it goes to the next screen it says operating system not found. I have a bunch of random disks to make into an ms dos installer disk but nothing will boot. And i know that the disks are working and aren’t dead or anything. What i’ve noticed tho is that the disks need to be formatted to fat12. I had a win95 boot disk that booted but when i reformat it to fat12 on my mac with my usb disk drive (for some reason it won’t work with windows) and tried to make a msdos boot disk it just doesn’t boot anymore. Is the mac not formatting the disks correctly?
Yea i’ve done all of that, changing the settings in the bios, nothing works
T-R-A
Veteran Member
Gotta ask these questions:
Does the machine already have any OS already on it?
Are the disks original or downloaded?
Certain the Floppy Drive is working?
And FWIW, there's no way any flavor of MS-DOS is gonna be able to use 512MB of RAM or anything beyond 8.4GB of hard drive space.
Does the machine already have any OS already on it?
Are the disks original or downloaded?
Certain the Floppy Drive is working?
And FWIW, there's no way any flavor of MS-DOS is gonna be able to use 512MB of RAM or anything beyond 8.4GB of hard drive space.
This is a guess, could probably be verified if/when you post what it says when it fails to boot, but I think your issue is that you are using a mac to make DOS formatting disks. I'd look for a disk imaging utility for MacOS and try to write out a sector by sector copy of that to the disk. Disk Utility could probably do it, or you could try DD in the terminal (assuming you have a version of MacOS that has DD, like 10.9 or newer I think).
MacOS does weird things when you try to use it to create file systems that are not natively supported by the OS (any FAT filesystems).
I am skeptical of how you are formatting the floppies too. Not all USB floppy drives work exactly as a real floppy would. Yes, the read/write, but may not
do some of the other things quite the same. I remember having some problem years ago with a USB floppy. Had to get a different brand/model. Don't remember the details.
do some of the other things quite the same. I remember having some problem years ago with a USB floppy. Had to get a different brand/model. Don't remember the details.
The machine used to have windows 3.1 but i erased it, but when i had it, i could look in the a: drive and see that the drive was working so yes the floppy drive is working. As for the disks they are not original, i’m using winworld to get the img files
edit: oh and actually i had ms dos 7.1 running on 512 mb of ram and a 40gb hd, partitioned to 2gb
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I mean if windows would let me use the floppy drive i think it would do a better job at formatting the disks, mac doesn’t use fat or any ms related stuff so that may be contributing to the problem
Yea i was thinking the same thing, macs don’t use ms file systems so maybe that’s contributing to a problem. I did try to find a partition manager program to work with and i did find one and use it but still it doesn’t solve to problem. Should i be searching for a disk imaging utility like you said or is that the same thing as a partition manager
the thing is, i’ve always resorted to using the cd drive but i don’t want to use that anymore. I’m really trying to get the disk drive working, i’m sure the drive is working tho, there must be a problem with what i’m doing to the disks or something like a file system problem or if it’s just me using a usb floppy drive
There lies your issue. You wrongly assume the CMOS error is fine, but it is not. It's not going to boot from floppy because it simply don't remember the settings you do in the BIOS. Sort that CMOS error out first, which means replace the coin cell on the mainboard.
You don't usually use partitioning tools for floppy disks. I'd look for an imaging solution that allows you to write an image to the disk without needing to format it. Winimage is what I use for Windows.
The cmos battery isn’t the issue, i’ve still have gotten the error and when i tried the win95 boot disk it worked. I also check the bios every-time i do a restart and the floppy drive is first on the boot order
Got it, well since windows doesn’t work well with my floppy drive i’ll check if there are any imaging solutions for mac and see if that might fix the issue
GeoffB17
Veteran Member
One thing not mentioned. When you've formatted the disk as a boot disk, have you done the format /s option which puts the system onto the disk. More specifically, it needs to put a piece of code into the start of the disk, over and above the .SYS files. Maybe the way you're doing this on the mac is not doing this.
You say you've got a disk for WinDoze that DOES boot. Make a diskcopy of this disk (i.e. copy the complete disk track-by-track) then delete all the files. Then copy the files from the MSDOS 5 disk, BUT... You must copy the BIOS file first, so it's the first file on the disk. The name of this file might vary, sometimes it's IO.SYS, or it's the .SYS file that is NOT MSDOS.SYS. Then copy everything else. NB the BIOS file MUST be the FIRST file in the directory.
Geoff
You say you've got a disk for WinDoze that DOES boot. Make a diskcopy of this disk (i.e. copy the complete disk track-by-track) then delete all the files. Then copy the files from the MSDOS 5 disk, BUT... You must copy the BIOS file first, so it's the first file on the disk. The name of this file might vary, sometimes it's IO.SYS, or it's the .SYS file that is NOT MSDOS.SYS. Then copy everything else. NB the BIOS file MUST be the FIRST file in the directory.
Geoff
There’s a weird problem going on. I’m trying to do what you say but everytime i select io.sys and copy it to my disk or even copy it to a folder it never shows up. I even checked in the dos prompt on this temp windows machine i have and it doesn’t show up. What’s going on?
At the DOS prompt do a "dir /a" and it should show up. It's a hidden system file, so it not showing up in regular folder listings is to be expected.