Making foreign DOS boot floppies (IBM).

From: John Allain <allain_at_panix.com>
Date: Mon Apr 12 11:03:06 2004

Up to now the way I've made bootable floppies of any necessary DOS
version by shutting down my master system, rebooting to the appropriate
floppy, format/s, copy, then reboot the master system to disk, which
works but is pretty time consuming.

What I'd like to do is all of this with the master running the normal
higher-version O/S. I've gotten this far:

   Step one seems to be generic: format command.
   Step two is ?
   Step three is to copy IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS
   Step four is to mark IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS with attrib as
      System, Hidden, and Read-Only.
   Step five: copy COMMAND.COM,CONFIG.SYS,AUTOEXEC.BAT
      and then the rest of DOS.

Apparently all DOS 3.5" floppies are FAT format with the capacity
is 1,457,664 bytes, regardless the version, after accounting for the
two hidden files, so...
Is there a way I can patch or debug the floppy after generic
format to make it look bootable?

John A.
or should I say Hi Fred?
Received on Mon Apr 12 2004 - 11:03:06 BST