China DOS Union

I've tried repeatedly without success!

What virtual machine are you using, and what are the error messages if it doesn't work?

Theoretically, there are no problems at all. Pay attention to the partition type in the virtual machine. Before DOS 3.0, DOS seemed to only support FAT12/16, right?

To avoid conflicts, I installed 2 WINXP systems, and installed VWare5.5 and Microsoft's VP2004 respectively. The minimum memory on the virtual machine can only be adjusted to 4MB. Is this the cause! The minimum hard disk is 100MB, which cannot be smaller. And this is much better than early computers!

Error message: No system disk! Or the floppy disk format is incorrect!
I always use FAT16 for DOS systems, but I've seen that DOS 1.0 doesn't support hard disks! FAT12 is also not useful

I remember that versions after DOS 4.0 support FAT 16, while previous versions only support FAT 12, and hard disk partitions also need to be FAT12. The upper limit of the FAT12 partition seems to be 32M, but nowadays partition tools generally only divide partitions of less than十几 megabytes into FAT12.

Also, versions of DOS before 3.1 did not support 1.44M floppy drives, only 5-inch disks and 720K 3-inch disks. But currently, virtual machines seem to only be able to simulate 3-inch floppy drives. Let's try making do with simulating a 720K 3-inch floppy drive.

For FAT12, what tools are used for partitioning and formatting, are they fdisk and format? I don't understand English very much, can I use the Chinese - localized FDISK? What version of DOS's fdisk and format can be used?

Set the virtual machine hard disk partition as small as possible (below 20M, preferably below 10M). Then, the partition will be formatted as FAT12 naturally after formatting.

Virtual machines generally can simulate all standard floppy disk images larger than 360K.
160K, 180K single-sided disks, 320K double-sided disks are not supported.
Generally found DOS 1.x/2.x are all single-sided disks, of course, cannot be used on VPC and VMWARE.
You can use the old version (4.0) of VPC to create vhd smaller than 30M. (Remember to choose FAT16).
DOS 2.1 starts to support hard disks.

[ Last edited by yksoft1 on 2006-3-14 at 23:52 ]

Originally posted by yksoft1 at 2006-3-14 11:50 PM:
Virtual machines generally can simulate almost all standard floppy disk images larger than 360K.
160K, 180K single-sided disks, and 320K double-sided disks are not supported.
Most DOS 1.x/2.x found are single-sided disks, so of course they cannot be used on VPC and VMWARE...

Loading an empty 360K image in VPC and then using software like Teledisk in VPC to write 160K/180K/320K images to the image file is possible

VPC can use a 360K image. I haven't succeeded. Is it necessary to change the floppy drive type in the virtual machine BIOS?

I did manage to use 1.84M and 2.88M images in VPC by changing the virtual floppy drive type before.

VMWARE can use 360KB images. The MSDOS 3.2 I installed is a 360KB one. Sometimes the floppy drive type in the.bios needs to be changed, and sometimes it doesn't. Of course, changing it increases the chance of success!

Floor 11:



Quote:
Originally posted by yksoft1 at 2006-3-14 11:50 PM:
Virtual machines generally can simulate almost all standard floppy disk images larger than 360K.
160K, 180K single-sided disks, and 320K double-sided disks are not supported.
Generally, the found DOS1.x/2.x are all single-sided disks, so of course they cannot be used on VPC and VMWARE...


Loading an empty 360K image in VPC, and then using software like Teledisk in VPC to write 160K/180K/320K images to the image file is possible.
Can you speak more specifically? Is there a place to download this software?

In the virtual machine VPC, I forcibly extracted a 160K floppy disk image into a 360K floppy disk image, and I successfully booted into DOS 1.1.