China DOS Union

I used ntloader's /win95dos parameter today to set up dual boot for DOS 6.22 and Win98. wengier, can this also be used for dual booting DOS 7.10 and Win98?

I can't do it myself, and I don't know whether anyone else has posted it. It seems DOS and Win98 both need to boot from drive C.

Why install a dual boot with DOS 6.22 and Win98??? DOS 6.22 has very poor compatibility, can easily damage the system, and is incompatible with Win98.

Dual booting MS-DOS 7.10 and Win98 is a completely different matter. You only need to create a menu in the CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT files. The specific method is to install MS-DOS 7.10 first, then create a menu like this in CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT:

CONFIG.SYS：


MENUITEM=DOS,MS-DOS 7.10
MENUITEM=WIN,Windows 98






DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS
etc.

AUTOEXEC.BAT：

@ECHO OFF
LH DOSKEY
etc.

GOTO %CONFIG%

:WIN
CD \WINDOWS
WIN <- start Win98
GOTO DOS

OS
ECHO MS-DOS 7.10 started successfully!

This machine was just installed: first DOS 6.22, then 98SE, then XP. There wasn't any problem at all. Booting and usage are all normal. How can you say there are compatibility problems?

The following is quoted from gao80470's post at 2003-11-28 1:17:58:
This machine was just installed: first DOS 6.22, then 98SE, then XP. There wasn't any problem at all. Booting and usage are all normal. How can you say there are compatibility problems?

DOS 6.22 does not support long filenames (after installing Win98 there are long filenames everywhere, while MS-DOS 7.x fully supports long filenames), large hard disks (it supports only up to 2-8GB at most), large memory (it supports only up to 64MB at most), etc. Also, you cannot run the Win9x GUI under DOS 6!! So DOS 6 may at any time cause damage to long filenames already on the hard disk or to large hard disks, damage that is sometimes hard to notice (and in fact, being hard to notice is the most dangerous part) and impossible to recover from, especially after running DOS 6 disk tools such as SCANDISK!! I had this kind of experience myself several years ago when I was still using DOS 6, so I advise everyone not to do this anymore. If you're rather conservative and really like antique software, you'd be better off installing DOS 3.3 instead. That was the real classic gem from back then.

wengier, I mean using the ntloader menu to achieve multi-boot, using that /win95dos parameter. I think this way DOS 7 and Win98 could use different config.sys and autoexec.bat, right? I just haven't tried it yet.

hunome: It isn't easy to use the ntloader menu to make a dual boot for DOS 7.1 and Win98 (/win95dos was something I mentioned back then, but it was only for dual booting DOS 8 and Win98, not DOS 7.1 and Win98). If you really want to make a dual boot this way, how about using software like VFLOPPY or GRUB instead?

wengier, today I got dual boot for DOS 7 and Win98 working. The boot file for both systems is that bootsect.dos. Each system uses its own io.sys. This way there is no need for a two-level menu; when booting Win98 there are the blue skies and white clouds, and when booting DOS there aren't.

hunome: Of course it can be done, it's just not easy for ordinary users, so I don't recommend this method (because it involves modifying the boot sector). Actually, on the computer I'm using now, this is exactly the method I use to boot multiple differently configured copies of MS-DOS 7.10.