Booting To Dos From The Hard Drive

robinwilson16 · #1 29th Jul 02, 11:39 AM

Is it possible to boot into ms-dos using the hard drive by copying the contents of a windows startup disk and putting them on the hard drive then altering boot.ini to be able to select msdos on the other partition on a dual boot with an ntfs formated windows xp drive. I have tried this and all that was happening was after selecting ms-dos the screen was going black and the computer was restarting or it was asking for the location of hal.dll in the system32 directory (whick is not requested from the ms-dos floppy disk) and refusing to start without it. All I want to do is a minimal boot on a computer without a floppy drive so I can upgrade the bios.

Thanks for any ideas

unicorn · #2 29th Jul 02, 01:29 PM

If all you need is to update your bios, why noy boot from a floppy (ms-dos-floopy)? No hassles, no worries.

JacKDynne · #3 29th Jul 02, 03:21 PM

@ unicorn:

Quote:

All I want to do is a minimal boot on a computer without a floppy drive so I can upgrade the bios

:P

@ robin: The easiest way is to just hook up a floppy drive to the pc if ya can and boot off it....no messing with any files that can do you in later....

/JD

Last edited by JacKDynne at Jul 29 2002, 09:24 AM

unicorn · #4 29th Jul 02, 03:39 PM

Ooops... I read to fast I think. Sorry for such a pointless answer. Shame on me...

Dave · #5 29th Jul 02, 03:45 PM

It wouldn't work anyway on a NTFS drive.
Nor could you "copy" the files because Io.sys is location specific and must be in the first sectors following the MBR.
You would have to do a "sys C:" with a Win-9x boot disk, but then you would loose the ability to boot into XP because it would overwrite the pointer in the MBR looking for the XP boot files.
(Thats whats giving you the error now, the MBR is looking for NT).
Dave

JacKDynne · #6 29th Jul 02, 04:47 PM

Thanks Dave for explaining this...

.unicorn- I read too fast sometimes as well. No shame involved m8...

robin- hmmm...looks like there's no way around it, you're gonna have to hook up a floppy drive somehow! :P

/JD

unicorn · #7 29th Jul 02, 04:55 PM

But - if you have a drive formatted FAT (16 if you use a ms-dos 6 floppy and 16 or 32 with a dos-7-floppy) and put the BIOS-update files there... then you could take your bootfloppy, use another machine and make a bootable CD using the floppy as template for the booting function, boot the box with the cd and run the biosupdate stuff.
If you have a dos-6-floppy you could in fact have space on it for the bios-files as well. Make a bootable cd from it as above and then boot the first box regardless of os or filesystem of the harddrive.

@JacKDynne: Nah, it's good shaming a little every now and then...

Dave · #8 29th Jul 02, 05:27 PM

You need a floppy drive.
If you were to make a bootable CD, not only would you not be able to backup your current BIOS but you would have all kinds of junk loaded in memory that can screw up the flash.
In order to access the root of the CD you would have to load drivers because you couldn't get there though strict el-torito support and the last thing you want is anything loaded from an autoexec.bat or config.sys.
When you flash a BIOS you only want the minimal required files: Command.com, Io.sys, and msdos.sys
Anything else and your taking a chance of killing your board. (IMO).
Best of luck,
Dave

unicorn · #9 29th Jul 02, 06:07 PM

Basically I agree (which also can be understood from my first hasty answer).

But, if you have to come up with other solutions a bootable CD can be one of theese.

You always put your mobo at a risk when upgrading the BIOS. One small chance is that there will happen something with the power (unless it's a laptop or you have a PSU (or what they are called) of course), onechance that the new BIOS-version is totally wrecked and never let you boot again. So, using the flash-util you normally make a backup on the floppy that you normally use and then there is a chance that you can back it up in case of catastrophy. (This is not always possible.) The backup could also be placed at the harddrive (not equally safe but better than nothing) if the flash-util permits this. (IMHO)

For the record: I just made a bootable CD as described above using Nero. The resulting CD booted fine, used same amount of memory as a boot-floppy, got the drive label A: and could access my fat-partitions. No problems so far. Then I also made an ISO of the CD and it came out in the size of 63k.

robinwilson16 · #10 30th Jul 02, 06:18 PM

Thanks for the replies.
I think I might have to attach an external floppy drive to the laptop. This would mean buying one though
I have tried creating a bootable cd from some information on ETplanet but it's not working and is just saying file not found when I try to boot from it.

.unicorn - Please could you give me the iso you made so I can burn it because I am not having much luck creating one of my own.

Thank you