China DOS Union

Because I use SystemCommander to boot my WINXP and LINUX, I was planning to use the same method: carve out a dedicated partition for DOS, install it there, and then have SC boot the system from that partition.
So under XP I used PQ-MAGIC to create partition J: (200M) for installing DOS, formatted it as FAT16, and set it as a primary partition. Then I tried installing the MSDOS or FREEDOS downloaded from here... But after booting with a boot disk, the problem came up: I couldn't find the J: drive I had created. There was no such 200M drive in the system at all, so I couldn't use SYS to write the system to J:. If under XP I set J: back to a logical partition and then reboot with the boot disk, I can see that drive, and I can also use the command "sys . j:" to write to it, but if I tell Systemcommander to boot from J:, it still can't boot into DOS... Please help me, everyone, thanks.

I haven't used systemcommander, but judging from the way boot managers work, it may be drive letter displacement. Please check the contents of drive C under DOS.

The following is quoted from pluto_zj's post at 2003-5-2 17:57:40:
Because I use SystemCommander to boot my WINXP and LINUX, I was planning to use the same method: carve out a dedicated partition for DOS, install it there, and then have SC boot the system from that partition.
   So under XP I used PQ-MAGIC to create partition J: (200M) for installing DOS, formatted it as FAT16, and set it as a primary partition. Then I tried installing the MSDOS or FREEDOS downloaded from here... But after booting with a boot disk, the problem came up: I couldn't find the J: drive I had created. There was no such 200M drive in the system at all, so I couldn't use SYS to write the system to J:. If under XP I set J: back to a logical partition and then reboot with the boot disk, I can see that drive, and I can also use the command "sys . j:" to write to it, but if I tell Systemcommander to boot from J:, it still can't boot into DOS... Please help me, everyone, thanks.

Try some other partitioning software, something like SPFDISK, this kind of DOS partitioning tool. How many primary partitions do you already have?

I messed with it all afternoon and installed FREEDOS, but it still won't boot.
I still made J: a primary partition, physically located between C and D. Although the DOS boot disk still doesn't recognize my J drive, booting from the FREEDOS CD lets me install onto it. Under DOS its drive letter becomes C. After installation I can run SYS C:, but if I specify booting from J, it still won't start. The screen shows "FreeDOS FAT Kernel GO!". I checked the contents of J: under XP, and in the root directory I didn't see IO.SYS, only COMMAND.COM and kernel.sys... Is it that the system file names in FREEDOS are different from those in MSDOS? What should I do now?

Use spfdisk.