China DOS Union

I now officially announce: after some research and practice on my part, by removing the LOGO and modifying the file header information, I have now officially slimmed down MS-DOS 7.10's IO.SYS to 123KB (125,960 bytes), reducing disk space usage by as much as 100K. Tests have proven that it can not only boot from a hard disk, but also from a floppy disk! From now on everyone can officially put it on their own boot disks. Download address:

Open attachment link has expired (admin note)

I have already put it into the Super MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk I made, and I'll upload this boot disk right away.

This latest MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk has now been uploaded, download address:
http://newdos.yginfo.net/dosware/mdos71bd.zip

The above address is no longer valid. The new link is http://www.cn-dos.net/msdos71/mdos71bd.zip (admin note 2009-9-6)

OK, I'll give it a try.

Wengier, could you make the modification method public?

Actually, it's not that hard. Besides removing the second and third parts of IO.SYS, you just need to modify two bytes in the file header information (you can tell exactly by comparing with the FC command). Finally, you need to fill in a few 00H hex values at the very end, until it can boot.

Congratulations
Do you have to fully understand the source code?

The following is quoted from Wengier's post at 2003-4-21 11:15:04:
Finally, you need to fill in a few 00H hex values at the very end, until it can boot.

It's 1536 of them, right...

Moderator, you're amazing. Could you also slim down Windows ME's IO.SYS? Windows ME is better and more stable than 7.1.

The following is quoted from dosguest's post at 2003-4-21 15:54:24:
Congratulations
Do you have to fully understand the source code?

Where would there be source code? If there were, that would be great.

The following is quoted from Rock2000's post:
Moderator, you're amazing. Could you also slim down Windows ME's IO.SYS? Windows ME is better and more stable than 7.1.

WinME(MS-DOS 8.00)'s IO.SYS is already quite small to begin with, only a little over 110K, and it's already compressed. But I really don't think MS-DOS 8.0 is better to use than 7.1; at least its compatibility isn't as good as MS-DOS 7.1's.

I forgot to check at first, ME's IO.SYS is only 110K. I still feel ME is better—for example, it can't load HIMEM.SYS or EMM386.EXE, but personally I think its memory management is better. For example, Wuyou's boot uses 7.1, but the Partition Magic in it gives an EMS memory insufficient prompt when starting, and Disk Ginius 2.0 can't start either (maybe it doesn't support EMS386.EXE). No matter how I changed it, I couldn't fix it. Later I switched to the expert's Super 7.1 boot, and Disk Genius 2.0 could start, but Partition Magic still prompted that EMS memory was insufficient on startup. I changed it to an ME boot later, and all the problems were solved.

EMS memory insufficient, is that it? Just remove the NOEMS parameter from DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS in CONFIG.SYS. But it seems PQ doesn't need EMS memory, right? At what point does it prompt that EMS memory is insufficient?

Moderator, you're really impressive, I have to admit it , thanks

By the way, why is it that this io.sys works in vpc, but not on my computer? What's the reason?

It works normally on both my 1.44M floppy disk and 30G hard disk.

Roy's environment may have some kind of problem.

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I used it and put PQ7.0 onto a 1.44M floppy disk, using TW as the Chinese-language platform, and it works normally both on my own computer and on our company's Founder computer:
http://www.tianao.org/copy114/bbs1/UploadFile/200342122505195996.gif