Most boot issues can be fixed using a few DOS commands, such as FDISK.EXE /mbr and SYS.EXE A: C: (A: being a bootable DOS disk and C: the formatted C: Disk). The majority of industrial cards perform better and do not have a removable bit set within them, as the consumer variants do which are for use within camera, mp3 players etc. This avoids problems with BIOS limitations and boot sectors not being correctly written. The best option to succeed with a CF IDE adapter combination is to use an Industrial CF card that is 512MB to 2GB in size. i.e do not function within the operating system as a standard IDE disk would. Most CF cards are not fully “IDE” compatible. You’ll have to use Disk Management to eject the device for your CF card (which is safer than just yanking it), but you don’t really need to assign a letter unless you want to browse its files directly from Windows. There should be nothing special in the MS-DOS setup process itself at this point, just make sure you allocated a DOS partition in the hard drive you’ve mounted and set it as active… and you’re done!
RUFUS MS DOS 6.22 ISO INSTALL
Then, browse to the first disk of the MS-DOS 6.22 install set.
RUFUS MS DOS 6.22 ISO PC
![rufus ms dos 6.22 iso rufus ms dos 6.22 iso](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ntxqt.png)
Here’s the gist : use a virtual machine to mount the CF card as a virtual hard drive, then use the real MS-DOS 6.22 installer diskettes to create a partition and install DOS on it. The whole thing assumes that the “modern PC” you’re setting all of that from is running Windows. Regardless, here’s the solution I ended up with.
![rufus ms dos 6.22 iso rufus ms dos 6.22 iso](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WkGOp.png)
RUFUS MS DOS 6.22 ISO WINDOWS
I could install FreeDOS or even Windows 98’s MS-DOS 7.0 relatively easily, but I don’t want to. Possibly because the disk/MBR layout of a fixed drive and a floppy must differ…? In any case, I was never able to make a bootable partition that way.Īt this point I feel like I need to stress : this is not a sensible project.
![rufus ms dos 6.22 iso rufus ms dos 6.22 iso](https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/ubd_top-650x300.png)
The options I saw just Googling variations of “ install ms-dos to usb” (since on the modern PC, the CF card is connected via USB) were as follows : And it turns out installing MS-DOS without a FDD can be a tricky thing! I did not, however, have a floppy disk drive nor a CD-ROM drive. This week I was at point where I had everything to get started : a motherboard and CPU, graphics card, IDE hard drive, power supply, and a Compact Flash to IDE adapter with a 2Gb CF card. My endgoal is to reproduce the PC setup I had as a kid MS-DOS 6.22, QuickBasic 4.5, a bunch of DOS games and ANSI art demos. I’m currently building a 486 “retro” PC for fun, out of parts sourced from a combination of my dad having it lying around in the basement, eBay, and generous friends. A guide for a very specific problem, but hey, I had trouble doing it and pieced out the solution from a bunch of sources and advice, so here’s a distillation of that.