China DOS Union

Perhaps you don't understand how the experts transform the MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk. Why can they add more tools to the system disk to make it have stronger and more perfect functions? Now, I'll give a detailed introduction.

First of course, make a standard DOS boot disk. There is still 245K space on the made system disk. It's completely no problem to put a few small software such as mouse drivers. Of course, for making a super strong system disk, this space is too small.

Next, let's first take a look at what's in this boot disk. The following is the list of all files on the system disk and their sizes. Some files are hidden, and you can use tools like NORTON COMMAND to "see" them. Then, extract the compressed package EBD.CAB (you can open it with WINZIP 7 or higher versions, WINRAR, WINACB, etc.).

------------DOS system core files---------------
IO.SYS 224,150 Basic input/output management system
MSDOS.SYS 9 Setup file
COMMAND.COM 94,292 Command interpreter
DRVSPACE.BIN 68,871 Compressed disk driver (delete)
---------------Startup configuration files----------------
AUTOEXEC.BAT 1,103
CONFIG.SYS 629
---------------Device drivers-----------------
OAKCDROM.SYS 41,302 CD-ROM driver
BTCDROM.SYS 21,971 CD-ROM driver (delete)
ASPICD.SYS 29,620 CD-ROM driver (delete)
BTDOSM.SYS 30,955
RAMDRIVE.SYS 12,663 Virtual disk driver program
ASPI4DOS.SYS 14,386
ASPI2DOS.SYS 35,330
ASPI8DOS.SYS 37,564
ASPI8U2.SYS 40,792 (I deleted it, no problem occurred)
FLASHPT.SYS 64,425 (I deleted it, no problem occurred)
HIMEM.SYS 33,191 Extended memory management program
EXTRACT.EXE 93,242 Tool to extract CAB compressed package
FINDRAMD.EXE 6,855 Tool to find virtual disk drive letter
FDISK.EXE 64,124 Hard disk partition management tool
README.TXT 14,764 Instruction file (English) (delete)
SETRAMD.BAT 1,416 Batch file to find virtual disk drive letter
---------------Compressed package files------------
EBD.SYS 0
EBD.CAB 274,142 Compressed package
-----------Files in EBD.CAB--------
CHKDSK.EXE 28,112 File detection tool
DEBUG.EXE 20,554 Debugging tool
EDIT.COM 72,174 Text editor
SCANDISK.EXE 144,211 Disk detection/repair tool
SCANDISK.INI 7,329 SCANDISK configuration file (delete)
SYS.COM 19,159 System file transfer tool
MSCDEX.EXE 25,473 CD-ROM driver tool
EXT.EXE 13,299 Enhance the function of EXTRACT (can delete)
ATTRIB.EXE 15,252 File attribute management
FORMAT.COM 49,655 Disk formatting tool
RESTART.COM 20 Disk restart (can delete)
HELP.BAT 36 Display content of README.TXT (delete)

What's next? Of course, first remove the unnecessary files, so that space can be freed up to place other software.
README.TXT no one will read, delete it
HELP.BAT What's left when README.TXT is deleted?
SCANDISK.INI Actually, SCANDISK doesn't need it, delete it
DRVSPACE.BIN Although it's a system file, basically no one uses compressed disks, delete it
There are actually 3 CD-ROM driver programs on the disk. Generally, IDE-EIDE CDROM is used, and the latter two can be deleted.
The functions of the remaining drivers are unknown. You can choose to keep them or try to delete them. In fact, all can be deleted and DOS can still start normally.
If you don't use DEBUG or CHKDSK, of course, you can also consider deleting them.
Microsoft actually puts the WIN98 boot LOGO picture in IO.SYS, really disgusting. If an expert can remove the picture in it, the volume can be reduced by about 100K.

Second step: Replacement. Except for the system core files and FORMAT, SYS and other files closely related to the core files, basically the external commands of MS-DOS can be replaced with the same-class commands of other DOS systems or third-party tools. The following are some of these tools. You can calculate by yourself how much space can be saved.
ATTRIB.COM 7,136 From FREEDOS
DEBUG.COM 15,286 From FREEDOS
SHSUCDX.EXE 6,811 From FREEDOS, replace MSCDEX.EXE
XCOPY.EXE 15,102 From FREEDOS
Deltree.com 3,970 From FREEDOS
HIMEM.SYS 5,835 From ROM-DOS7.1
VIDE_CDD.SYS 5,036 Acer CD-ROM driver, replace OAKCDROM.SYS

To be continued……

Good, please continue!

But I think replacing it with HIMEM.SYS from ROM-DOS may not be good, because it doesn't seem to support memory above 64M.

Does DOS use more than 64M of memory? 4M already meets the needs of more than 80% of software.

If you look at the boot disk of WINME, the IO.SYS of WINME is indeed about 100K smaller than that of WIN98.

I remember that our former tutor analyzed IO.SYS of Win95. It indeed contains the logo bitmap resource at startup, but it is stored using run-length encoding compression. It actually occupies about E4CCH bytes (approximately 57K) of space, and after decompression, it is 126K.

I think Win98 should be similar.

Also, I remember using a Debug that removed support for EMS and XMS and optimized the code, which was only about 9K. Now I can't find it. I wonder if everyone has noticed it.

Also, changing "2E" to "FF" at offset 1262H in Debug.exe can make Debug support Chinese. You might as well give it a try. The program I modified can be downloaded at Http://www2.zzu.edu.cn/ie/newdos/upload/cdebug.exe. Sometimes this function is quite useful.

But it's a pity not to use more than 64M of memory at all. For example, I want to use XMSDSK to create a 100M memory disk, but HIMEM.SYS won't work.

I also agree with Wengier's opinion. It's best not to remove himem.sys because what you're modifying is a WIN98 boot disk, not a DOS boot disk. The most distinctive feature of WIN98 and later versions is that some diagnostic tools are extracted to the memory virtual disk. Maybe a large space isn't needed for the boot floppy, but it becomes very important if it's made into a bootable CD.

Sui Feng Shun, can you come up with an article to give us a detailed analysis of IO.SYS?

Teacher Mo is really unfathomable!

Aspi2dos.sys: Adaptec CD-ROM driver
Oakcdrom.sys: ATAPI CD-ROM driver
Btcdrom.sys: Mylex/BusLogic CD-ROM driver
In the Windows 98 boot disk, there are the above several CD-ROM drivers. May I ask how to distinguish these types of CD-ROM drives? This question has been in my mind for a long time. Teacher Mo, can you explain it for me, thank you.

I'm not too clear either. At most, I know about IDE and SCSI interface optical drives.

Hurry up and continue!

Then, what are these three used for:

ASPI4DOS.SYS 14,386
ASPI2DOS.SYS 35,330
ASPI8DOS.SYS 37,564

I can still boot after deleting them?

The statement about the presence of the logo startup screen in io.sys was inadvertently discovered in a computer enthusiast magazine as early as 5 years ago. The process of discovery was inspired by the fact that the Win97 floppy disk could also display the startup screen during booting.