Creating a Dos Environment Via Partition Magic?

[paulried]

Time for an update..


Boy what an adventure this has been! After many trials and tribulations, I have successfully gotten a dual boot XP/DOS machine. Here is the timeline

1) Started with an XP home machine.
2) Installed Partition Magic 7.0 (PM) but during the installation, my neighbour stuck his nose the garage to see what I was doing. I missed the all important step in the installation of creating a set of bootable recovery disks. This will come back to haunt me later
3) Installed Dos 6.22 as per PM instructions and then got to the last line.......Insert the Boot Disk you made during PM installation to get back to XP.....YIKES!!!! Since I am a cheap wad, I would not pay the per call phone support so I relied on email support from PowerQuest. It didn't take too long to find out I was screwed. Only solution, was to wipe the hard disk clean and reinstalled XP from scratch and start all over again!
4) Four hours of reinstalling XP, upgrading, installing network drivers, printers, firewall, virus protection, it was back to installing PM again. This time I remembered to make the boot disks! DOS install went fine again and with the boot disks, I was able to get back to XP. YEAH, time to crack a beer open....but.....
5) Went to install BootMagic, which comes with PM, so that I could choose at bootup which operating system I want to be in rather than doing it from floppy disk. BootMagic would not install. It kept giving me an error that it could not find a visible FAT16 or FAT32 primary partition. Scoured the manual and found nothing, but did determine that the manual stinks. Time to email PowerQuest again.
6) Two days later I get an email from tech support telling me that all I need to do is go into PM, click the advanced tag and unhide the DOS partion. Gee, why didn't I think of that......kind of an important step that should have been covered in the manual if you ask me.

So, after 7 days, I am back up and running with a dual boot machine just like I wanted. I guess the wait was worth it, but I sure wish it was easier.

Two quick hints:

1) As per WMS's message above, I installed a FAT16 partition soley as a swap area that is visible to XP when it is running and also to DOS. This lets me use Windows software to create the machine files and save them to that partition so I can load the files from DOS without having to put them on a floppy.

2) WMS also indicated that PM7.0 will not do RAID 0, which is correct, but according to the web site, PM Pro7.0 and 8.0 both do, so if this is important to you, check it out at http://www.powerquest.com

Bottom line, it was well worth it. Just be careful and be sure to follow the instructions. I found the Knowledge base on the web site had better installation instructions for PM and BM then the manual.

Cheers!

[ger21]

If you have to start from scratch, just install DOS first and XP or WIN200 will handle the dual boot automatically.,

Gerry

[wms]

Gerry,
That's true. But with just XP or 2000 can you boot to more that 2 op's? And can you have a swap file? I don't know.
With PQ magic it is real easy to resize your partitions and create a new one after everything is installed.

[paulried]

Well, what fun would that be? I learned at least two new ways to pound my head against the wall!

Seriously, I did it because the guy from PowerQuest assured me it would work and I didn't want to do a third install. I am able to try Linux as well with this setup.

Most importantly I learned something new.

[WOODKNACK]

Hey guys,
MAybe I am missing something here. seems like you guys are working very hard to get into dos from XP? What do you need to get into dos for? To run a dos program maybe?
I am running XP proffessional on my pc. I have a old disk I made awhile ago. I put it in my computer and start is up. It brings me to an A:// promt with cdrom support! I then put in what ever disk I want to use , like say Turbocnc and start that program.
IS this what you guys are striving to get at!? I will put the file up in the file section for the disk if that is what you guys want? Maybe I am missing some here. I so please fill me in...

[paulried]

I am not a wild about booting off of a floppy all of the time to get to dos. However, for me, the big issue is networking. I have my machine in the workshop in a wireless network with the rest of the machines in the house. That way we share printers, scanners, cable modem, etc. It also allows me to have a shared directory for files that I can work on wherever (sometimes the hamock in the back yard has been a very productive place).

For me, the bottom line in convenience. Want to change operating systems, just do it. Need to get at a file that you created in XP from DOS, no problem and visa versa without rebooting.

[chuckknigh]

Windows XP supports, among other formats, an NTFS file system...not just the DOS compatible ones.

Simply booting from a DOS floppy is not always a viable option -- doing that on my Win2K machine (same NTFS file system) results in an inability to recognize my hard drive as containing valid data. It's literally an incompatible file format.

The more Micro$oft moves away from its DOS roots, the harder it will be to boot into DOS. Since Windows, in any form, is not a real-time operating system, any version of Windows will remain an iffy platform from which to run a CNC system.

Thankfully DOS was real time, as is LINUX, and so are several other options. DOS is just the most obvious RT OS to run if your files are on a Windows partition.

-- Chuck Knight

[paulried]

One other thing you run into is the ability to access large hard disks. If memeory serves me correctly you can access a max of 2 gig from DOS without a partion. If you boot to DOS via a floppy and have one of the commonly available "large" hard disks you will not be able to read data regardless if it recognizes it.

[ger21]

I couldn't figure out when I booted to DOS from a floppy the other day why my hard drive wasn't visible. NTFS, completely forgot about it.

Gerry

[tpworks]

I use multiple disk drives' you can pick up some small drives on Ebay cheap , partition it format it, install dos and in your bios choose a different drive to boot. Of course you will have to change your boot drive option when you want to boot windws or dos.

Tom