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Cannot boot from Dos

I just put together a 686 to transfer dos files from an ailing 486's hard drives. I was intending to use interlink or laplnk to do this. For the secons computer I found an old 1 gig (approx) hard drive with windows 95 on it. I reformated it from a dos 6.2 disk I had and installed dos 6.2 on it. I then transfered the system from the floppy to the hard drive. I got a "system transfered" message and assumed that I now had a bootable hard drive. The problem is that it will not boot from the hard drive. Command .com now shows to be in C:\ but I can't seem to figure out what I did wrong. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks, Lenny Stein, Barlen Electronics.

Reply to
captainvideo462002
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Most likely the drive was used as a second drive and does not have a master boot record on it.

You can try steps 6 on, but here's the whole thing.

Proper steps to do this:

  1. boot DOS floppy. You may want to use a DOS 7 (windows 98) floppy.
  2. Use FDISK to delete all the partitions in the extended partition.
  3. Use FDISK to delete the extended partition.
  4. Use FDISK to delete any remaining partitions.
  5. Use FDISK to allocate a DOS partition and make it active.
6, Reboot from floppy.
  1. Enter "FDISK /MBR" command. This resets the master boot record.
8, Reboot from floppy.
  1. "FORMAT C: /S"
  2. Reboot from hard drive.

Whatever you do, DO NOT use the feature of DOS that stuffs programs into "holes" in memory to give you 640k of executeable program space. It was a constant source of problems.

If you have a DOS 6.2 instalation floppy set (3 disks), it will do all of this for you.

Geoff.

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Reply to
Geoffrey S. Mendelson

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com inscribed thus:

Run "fdisk" and check that the drive is marked active.

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Best Regards:
                      Baron.
Reply to
Baron

Partition active????

Reply to
Ken

What's the error message?

Reply to
Meat Plow

Using sys c: you mean ?

You did it wrong.

You may even need to re-partition the disk, depending how it was originally set up (requires active primary DOS partition). I think it's the master boot record that'll be screwed up. You can avoid this by using DOS 5 IIRC but, once a HDD gets it into its head from a newer MS OS that it's not a system disk you do have to get back to basics to get it working otherwise.

Graham

Reply to
Eeyore 

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Reply to
JR North

Len, I think you are going about this all wrong.

Thing is I am not exactly clear about what you want to do. You just want to save files ? Well take your best PC and just plug the harddrive into the CDROM plug. Screw the CDROMs for now. Then you can simply and easily select shitloads of files in Windows Explorer and copy them. If one of your PCs can burn disks, the files can be put on any PC easily.

If you want to save the OS for some reason, you will have plenty of driver problems, but install disks are available all over the place. I actually do not have 95 but I think you can actually DL it without much trouble. As long as you have a key code, it should work.

I actually have a roving harddrive, a 40 gig for things like this. About half of my media library is on it. I just make sure it is set to master and unplug the CDROMs and leter rip. Much faster too, and this will even work with PCs with SATA harddrive(s) because CDROMs are still IDE. They still must have an IDE port.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to say exactly what you are trying to save. Operating systems pre 98SE are not really worth it unless you are hell bent on running older PCs. If you really like DOS, well, OK then. But I wish you would say, you don't want Windows at all or something ? If so fine, but I need to know if that is the case.

JURB

Reply to
ZZactly

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