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Is there anyway to make a floppy disk bootable manually?

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Zap!

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Here's the situation: I have DOS 3.30 on my XT on the C: drive. I also have X-TIDE (CF card), but that is the D: drive. I am able to put things on the CF card, and have 5.0 and 6.22 on the drive. I can put those files on a blank 5 1/4" floppy, but it won't boot. I thought changing the attributes (H, R, and S) of io.sys and msdos.sys would make it bootable after I put the 5.0 fiiles on a floppy, but it didn't.

I could use format a: /s, but that will only make it bootable as a 3.30 did. Using format in the 5.0 or 6.22 directories won't work because it's the incorrect DOS version..
 
Can you boot the 5.0 or 6.22 and then do a "sys a:"? This will transfer the needed files to the floppy and make it bootable (or should). Assuming your floppy is a:?
 
Copy a disk image program to the CF and use that program to write a bootable image to the floppy.
 
tradde said:
Can you boot the 5.0 or 6.22 and then do a "sys a:"? This will transfer the needed files to the floppy and make it bootable (or should). Assuming your floppy is a:?
Click to expand...
I have a 6.22 bootable but I'd like a more appropriate-era 5.0. All of the needed 5.0 files are on my D: drive. I can put them on a floppies, but running setup just tells me to reboot with the floppy in drive A:. It won't boot because the bootable files aren't on the disk.
 
Did you copy the MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS files? They usually have the "hidden" or "system" attribute set, so copy doesn't normally see them. Note that PC-DOS uses IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM.

The boot sector should be configured to boot whichever you have. You can copy the boot sector from a working copy using DEBUG, if you have to.
 
jafir said:
Copy a disk image program to the CF and use that program to write a bootable image to the floppy.
Click to expand...
I downloaded DOS 5.0 to my maid PC, and then used WinImage to extract the 5 image files into 5 directories (dos5-1, dos5-2, etc.) on my main PC. I then put those directories onto the CF card and then put it back in the XT.

Did you mean another way?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Did you copy the MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS files? They usually have the "hidden" or "system" attribute set, so copy doesn't normally see them. Note that PC-DOS uses IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM.

The boot sector should be configured to boot whichever you have. You can copy the boot sector from a working copy using DEBUG, if you have to.
Click to expand...
Yes. When extracted from an image file, they weren't hidden at all and had normal attributes. I set them to + H, R, and S and still nothing.
 
I would copy the original image files as they are, not extracted to the CF. Then get a DOS program that can write them. I like a program called DCF, but there are many others. I think you can use IMD as well, but you have to use the included utility to convert the file format to an IMD version.

There are a bunch of options mentioned here:

 
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If the files are there (and they need to be the first files on the disk, usually, the only other thing is the boot sector. What does it look like? Booting MSDOS is pretty simple--it has to be to fit in one sector.
 
jafir said:
I would copy the original image files as they are, not extracted to the CF. Then get a DOS program that can write them. I like a program called DCF, but there are many others. I think you can use IMD as well, but you have to use the included utility to convert the file format to an IMD version.

There are a bunch of options mentioned here:

Click to expand...
Thank you, I wound up using fdimage. Easy and worked like a charm!
 
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