Will MS-DOS 3.x run on a modern PC?

[JorgeA]

@rloew -- A ray of hope. How do we get a usable IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS from DOS 3.x onto a CD?

The easiest way is to create a 1.2MB or 1.44MB Bootable Floppy Disk, make an Image of it and burn a CD using the Floppy Image as a Boot Image.

rloew,

Great idea, thank you! I'll try that as soon as I get the chance.

If I add (for example) WordStar to this floppy image, can I then launch WordStar from the same CD?

--JorgeA

Edited October 30, 2011 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Although arriving late, I think I have some interesting info:

My A7V600-X, with an overclocked Athlon XP, boots all right every version of DOS up to DOS 8.0

PC-DOS 1.00 (1981) and 1.10 (1982), as well MS-DOS 5.00-6.22, 7.00, 7.10 and 8.00 boot as is.

PC-DOS 2.00-4.01 and MS-DOS 2.00-4.01 will boot provided I disable the VIA SATA BIOS, otherwise they'll hang.

CP/M-86 1.1 (1983) boots as is, with my nVidia GeForce2 MX 400 and with a plain GeForce 5200 FX, but will hang with any nVidia GeForce having an on-card DVI connector. CP/M-86 has no problems with the VIA SATA BIOS, however. This is what I found out for my hardware. I did not explore these results further, nor do I think I'll ever have time to do it. It should be pointed out that these results are for the bare hardware, not for any type of Virtual Machine.

dencorso,

This is all very good to know! In a way, it's reassuring to learn that it's still possible to boot a fairly recent machine with DOS 1.

Sorry I didn't get to reply sooner. It was a hectic week, capped by a Saturday snowstorm that felled trees and cut our power.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

@JorgeA

JFYI you can also have a grub4dos (or isolinux/memdisk) based CD holding as many Floppy images as they fit inside it and boot them as memory (or directly) mapped floppies.

jaclaz

jaclaz,

Another interesting possibility. I'll have to look into how to create such a CD. Grazie!

--JorgeA

[rloew]

@rloew -- A ray of hope. How do we get a usable IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS from DOS 3.x onto a CD?

The easiest way is to create a 1.2MB or 1.44MB Bootable Floppy Disk, make an Image of it and burn a CD using the Floppy Image as a Boot Image.

rloew,

Great idea, thank you! I'll try that as soon as I get the chance.

If I add (for example) WordStar to this floppy image, can I then launch WordStar from the same CD?

--JorgeA

Nearly anything that can run from a Floppy can be run from a CD. Windows and Disk Utilities are another story.

[JorgeA]

Nearly anything that can run from a Floppy can be run from a CD. Windows and Disk Utilities are another story.

Very neat -- thank you! I'll put WordStar and InfoStar on the CD and see what happens.

--JorgeA

[dencorso]

This is all very good to know! In a way, it's reassuring to learn that it's still possible to boot a fairly recent machine with DOS 1.

Sorry I didn't get to reply sooner. It was a hectic week, capped by a Saturday snowstorm that felled trees and cut our power.

Glad to know you're well and everything is all right. That's what matters most.

And yes it is reassuring for sure. I guess all machines having BIOS and at least one emulated floppy (a CD/DVD, for instance) can do it. And you can boot from a floppy image residing in the HDD, too, using Grub4DOS.

Now, machines having EFI instead of BIOS probably cannot.

[dencorso]

Although arriving late, I think I have some interesting info:

My A7V600-X, with an overclocked Athlon XP, boots all right every version of DOS up to DOS 8.0

PC-DOS 1.00 (1981) and 1.10 (1982), as well MS-DOS 5.00-6.22, 7.00, 7.10 and 8.00 boot as is.

PC-DOS 2.00-4.01 and MS-DOS 2.00-4.01 will boot provided I disable the VIA SATA BIOS, otherwise they'll hang.

CP/M-86 1.1 (1983) boots as is, with my nVidia GeForce2 MX 400 and with a plain GeForce 5200 FX, but will hang with any nVidia GeForce having an on-card DVI connector. CP/M-86 has no problems with the VIA SATA BIOS, however. This is what I found out for my hardware. I did not explore these results further, nor do I think I'll ever have time to do it. It should be pointed out that these results are for the bare hardware, not for any type of Virtual Machine.

dencorso,

This is all very good to know! In a way, it's reassuring to learn that it's still possible to boot a fairly recent machine with DOS 1.

Sorry I didn't get to reply sooner. It was a hectic week, capped by a Saturday snowstorm that felled trees and cut our power.

--JorgeA

I have reproduced the above results with my new machine. It's an Asus P8Z68-V LX with an Intel Core i7 3770K (Ivy Bridge) on it.

The main problem was how to perform any test in a board that has only SATA devices and no floppy disk drives at all, when I intended to turn SATA off. The solution was to use an external USB 2.0 CD/DVD reader/burner. So there it is: still I can boot PC-DOS 1.00 and 1.10, as well as MS-DOS 5.00 - 8.00 flawlessly, regardles of whether the SATA devices are turned on or off, but only when they are turned off can I boot PC-DOS 2.00-4.01 or MS-DOS 3.00-4.01 !!! So, it's not some quirck related to the VIA 8237 implementation of SATA (150, BTW) nor is it related to the Intel Z68 implementation of SATA (600, BTW): it is related to SATA in general, probably at the most basic and general level of the SATA standard... and it might be worthy of investigating while there still is hardware in which one can turn SATA on and off at will. Of course there's no real use for those really old legacy versions of DOS, but that, IMO, does not lessen the interest in finding out what DOS used to do that so utterly breaks down the workings of SATA to the point of freezing the machine.