DOS Boot CD?

[agent_js03]

Hi,
I'd like to create a cd that boots into DOS (i gots dos 6.2.2) for a couple of reasons:

1. I am a nostalgic gamer and many of my old games don't run well under xp.
2. I am a nostalgic user- I used to use DOS and like to go back to it sometimes.

So anyways, I have the installation but I'd like to get the installation and all the games onto one cd so I can boot into it and run it from there. I don't want to touch my hard drive, though, so that poses a problem. Is there a way of making an installation of DOS without installing onto my hd and moving the files over onto the cd? I might wanna access my fat32 hard drive; would dos read fat32 or do I need dos 7 for that?

Thanks!

[Erik]

It certainly can be done, but I am not real sure how you would go about it. I believe it is the Emergancy Boot CD that allows you to boot into DOS on a RAM drive, with access to the CD. You might want to try just adding whatever games you want to that basic CD and see if you can run them from there.

[Sylvander]

See www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=37571&highlight=ebcd

The 2nd menu on this allows the user to boot to a DOS 7.10 prompt and run any of the DOS-based programs already on [or added to] the CD.
I've never done that with it though.

I think the making of images for making bootable floppies and CD's is also discussed in the above thread.

Paul Komski knows quite a bit about that sort of thing.

[Paul Komski]

It's easy enough to use a DOS622 boot floppy to create a bootable CD using floppy emulation but you will only have 1.44MB of space to play with directly. Any number of files (within the constraints of the size of the medium) can burned to the CD part of the same CD.

If you have a HDD installation of DOS622 (even just temporarily) then you can use it to make a bootable CD using hard disk emulation. Nero does this pretty well.

However both of these methods have the limitation that if anything needs to be written to the DOS "installation" it cant be done because although the medium appears to be magnetic (by emulation) it is in fact running on an optical medium.

So if anything needs to be written to the installation (while it is running from the CD) then a RAMdrive is the best way forward. I can see that an EBCD could have possible workarounds that might suit your purposes but it wouldnt simply "boot into DOS" for you.