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Quick Survey: What version of Dos for XT machines?

You don't need luck finding MS-DOS 6.22 on 360K. I know exactly where they are, and if there are problems, I have an original set that we can archive.

Now the 720K are still in the wind, but I did see a copy show up on ebay recently, but they were WAY too pricey for me. And as has been mentioned a few times, you don't really need matching media. Just format /s or sys a floppy, copy format and fdisk, and you're good to go. Everything else you can copy in some other fashion.
 
DDS said:
For most people these are nit picky things that can be worked around unless you want to use the Microsoft "installation" procedure to install on a HDD or equivalent.
Click to expand...

Because I had nothing better to do with my time for an hour or so I actually cooked up a way to use Bochs to install directly from a bootable CD version of PC-DOS onto an image file I could DD straight onto an SD card to slip into my Tandy 1000's XT-CF+SD adapter storage device, but I suppose that's getting into "advanced" territory.
 
keenerb said:
MSDOS 6.22 and/or DRDOS on all my machines regardless of age, because I enjoy pushing old tech to the limits of what it can do, like multitasking with dosshell or taskmgr, HMA/UMB on XT machines, and utilities like ETHERDFS and ETHFLOP.
Click to expand...
DRDOS for sure but that didn't come until I actually figured out how DOS actually worked.
 
sergey said:
There's no problem of creating a bootable DOS disk (or disk image) for whatever DOS version, either using a real hardware with appropriate floppy drives, or using an emulator.
Once you're able to boot, you can copy the rest of the installation. DOS installer didn't do much other than copying files and maybe creating or modifying AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS
Click to expand...

The problem there is "once you're able to boot". For that, you need boot media. Chicken and egg problem.
 
sergey said:
That you create using another machine or an emulator, as I've described in my reply. FORMAT /S or SYS would do
Click to expand...
So.... You need to have another machine running DOS X to create boot images for DOS X. And how did you get DOS X on the first machine? See the problem yet?

For me, the systems that I have support:
1. 360K 5.25" disks only.
2. 720K 3.5" disks (BIOS probably supports more, but hardware will only allow 1 720K drive).
3. 360K and 1.2M 5.25" disks, 720K 3.5" disks

I have a USB 3.5" drive that will support 1.44MB disks, but no modern hardware that can use it and boot DOS.

So if the only boot media I can find is a 1.44MB 3.5" disk, I can pull the files off, but I can't run FORMAT /S or SYS to create a bootable disk for a different format.
 
the3dfxdude said:
So my Dad's turbo XT clone had to come with DOS 3.x. For some reason he upgraded it to DOS 3.31, almost certainly related to wanting a bigger hard drive, and not wanting to use DOS 4. I don't remember what hard drive he would have been running at the time. The XT originally came with a 20MB Seagate, so perhaps a 40MB drive? Seems about right. When he upgraded, he gave me the XT with the 20MB hard drive, since he didn't need to buy a drive then. I continued to run DOS 3.31 on it, past when DOS 5 was out. I'm trying to remember if I had run later DOS, because I keep getting this feeling that it just didn't give anything new based on what I could run on the XT. I certainly did upgrade DOS when I upgraded the machine later. Of course today, something like PC-DOS 7 will be fine, if you need any of the late features or software. DOS 3.x is also fine though, generally covers anything you'd normally ran on an XT. But like people said, you don't use DOS 4 if you care about having conventional memory -- it was a known problem when it came out... no wonder why it failed pretty hard.
Click to expand...

Iam going to test it out. And see if that memory problem, could be an really pain in the ass.. or can life with it and just run around that `problem`
Maybe it can be solved by backfilling conventional memory with an EMS board.. Or there are other hoops to been taken.
 
Looks like Microsoft published the files listing of what’s on the floppy disks, so it looks like it should be possible to create your own 720K floppies, until someone archived an original set:

720k

Q117518: MS-DOS 6.22 Upgrade Directory Listings for 3.5-Inch 720K Set

An Archive of Early Microsoft KnowledgeBase Articles
jeffpar.github.io

360K

Q117521: MS-DOS 6.22 Upgrade Directory Listings for 5.25-Inch 360K Set

An Archive of Early Microsoft KnowledgeBase Articles
jeffpar.github.io

1.2MB

Q116396: MS-DOS 6.22 Step-Up Directory Listing 5.25-Inch 1.2 MB Set

An Archive of Early Microsoft KnowledgeBase Articles
jeffpar.github.io

Of course there is a file packing.lst that probably won’t match correctly.
 
rlauzon said:
So.... You need to have another machine running DOS X to create boot images for DOS X. And how did you get DOS X on the first machine? See the problem yet?
Click to expand...
If you have trouble creating a boot disk, you can use an Upgrade distribution of DOS: the setup utility can be run from any previous version of DOS. That's how I installed DOS 5.00 to my Amstrad PC1640 back in the 90s: boot from the Amstrad's dos 3.20 system disk in the 5.25" A: drive, and run setup from dos 5.00 upgrade disk in the 3.5" B: drive.

Nowadays I use PC-DOS 2000 in my XT clone.
 
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