Install dos operating system

You can get by with only one floppy diskette by writing the next disk image after the previous one completes installation, but I highly recommend using at least two diskettes so that you can have a copy of Disk 1 on hand at all times. You'll likely need to boot from or otherwise use that disk a number of times.

Since it's free, though, there really isn't a good reason to not upgrade. It's larger than a single floppy, and meant to be downloaded and run directly on the target computer, which is difficult for a freshly installed version of MS-DOS. To workaround, I suggest the following:. This disk is not mandatory, and mostly just includes some extra features from previous versions of DOS that were dropped for version 6. If you don't want to bother with it you won't be missing out on much, but just to be thorough let's take a look at how to install the more interesting stuff on here.

One reason, and one reason alone: QBasic Nibbles! I spent many hours playing this relatively simple but addictive Snake -like game as a kid, and was delighted to discover it on the supplemental disk. To try it yourself, just run qbasic.

It's essentially a primitive Windows-like or perhaps more accurately, 'Windows Light' environment that runs on top of DOS and provides a GUI file manager, file associations, a menu-driven task list, and even primitive pseudo-multitasking called Task Swapper here.

It's not something I'll care to use, but it's a pretty interesting idea that I was completely unfamiliar with before this project, and it seems like it could be a reasonably powerful interface if a little time is spent on configuring it just right though, honestly, running Windows 3. I'm not going to dive into this here as it's beyond the scope of " mostly pure MS-DOS", but here are a couple tips if you want to play around with this:.

Next, I recommend installing a couple utilities that will make the rest of the setup process much easier. As with the step-up files above, getting the files to the system is still annoying at this point. Until we get networking setup later on, I recommend unpacking the programs on your main computer and copying them over with floppies as the easiest option.

Tip: You will be repeatedly hand editing your system configuration files throughout this walkthrough, and it's very possible at some point that you may be stuck with a system that won't boot properly. This will perform a clean boot of the system, ignoring your autoexec. You can then edit them as appropriate to fix the problem, and reboot to load everything again. Note: Most DOS commands and options are not case-sensitive. While most of the text in the stock autoexec.

My personal naming convention, used throughout this document, is pretty simple: variables are fully capitalized, and almost everything else is lowercase. Feel free to leave everything uppercase if that works for you, though. SmartDrive is "a disk caching program LOADHIGH will load the specified program when possible into upper memory, freeing up the all important conventional memory for other applications.

This requires that EMM also be enabled, as shown below. Finally, the DIRCMD variable instructs the DIR command to display files sorted first by name, then by extension, with directories always listed first by default, it lists files sorted by date. Note that this shortens the amount of time you have to press F5 if you need to clean boot your system, but it's still possible if you're fast, or you hold down F5 right before DOS starts loading which is what I do.

I discuss this a bit more in the Addendum below. I recommend rebooting at this point to let the new configuration take effect. NIC Drivers you'll need to grab drivers for your specific NIC; these drivers cover my system, and will be used for the walkthrough :. Now it's time to finally configure networking. Getting this up and running is extremely helpful because it largely eliminates the need for floppy disks.

Unfortunately, networking under DOS is It can be done, but it's somewhat limited, slow, and painful to install due to multiple driver and network protocols. So, get ready for some fun!

The first decision to make is to decide what kind of networking support you want installed. In brief, there are two types of drivers we're going to install:. NDIS - the newer device driver interface co-developed by Microsoft, with somewhat more features and capabilities at the expense of more bugs and significantly more memory usage. This is required for Microsoft networking utilities, including support for drive mapping.

Most non-Microsoft network utilities require a packet driver interface and will not work with only NDIS installed. Fortunately, this isn't a one-or-the-other choice; it's possible to install support for both with some extra work.

If you only need one or the other, though, save yourself the hassle and go with that one. I'm going to walk through installing both below, and point out what you should do differently if you only want to install one of the drivers.

For the full experience it's worth setting up NDIS it can be cleanly disabled if you decide it's not worth it , but if you just want to get up and running as quickly is possible, the PD-only option should suffice, and is all I use on my system after experimenting with all of this. Download the appropriate driver package for your NIC and consult the documentation for details. This file can be manually unpacked, but it's probably easiest to use QStart to unpack them for you:.

The 0x60 option for each specifies the software interrupt; 0x60 is the default, and there shouldn't be a reason to change it unless you're using multiple NICs. Run the above command now to manually load the driver; assuming you have an ethernet cable plugged in, it should automatically detect the connection. NDIS driver installation is quite a bit more involved. It can be installed manually like the PD, but instead we're going to let installation and configuration be handled by Microsoft Network Client 3.

Running each EXE file will unpack them to the current directory if you didn't unpack them before hand. If prompted, it's safe to overwrite any files as a few exist on both disks assuming you copied the MS-Client disks to their own directory. Note: If you are using a 3c90x card, you must edit oemsetup. Comment out or delete the following lines and save the file:. A bug in the MS-Client installer prevents a file necessary for Windows 3.

This isn't necessary if running solely under DOS, but it doesn't hurt in anyway, so let's install it just to be safe. If you run into any other trouble, or have questions about some of the options, official MS-Client setup documentation is still available from Microsoft. MS-Client updated your system configuration files during setup, so let's review those changes and make a couple changes. First, edit config. These are some of the various network services installed by MS-Client.

We're requesting that they load themselves into high memory. This indicates you've run out of upper memory, and MS-Client isn't smart enough to load itself into conventional memory instead. This is only required if you plan on mapping shared drives, and can be disabled if you do not wish to auto-mount drives at login. If you do plan to mount shared drives, go ahead and enter your username now or just press Enter to accept what you specified during MS-Client setup , then enter the password for your account.

In either case, choose Y to create a password list when prompted. We can perform a few tests to confirm, but note that the utilities described below, though named the same as modern utilities, work differently than what you're probably used to again, think "primitive". Next, make sure you can ping your own IP, eg.

The bottom line should say "echo received". Finally, make sure you can ping your gateway's IP address this can be found in the ipconfig output :. Again, the bottom line should say "echo received". If all that worked, congrats, you're up and running!

However, there's one more major issue we need to take care of. Due to another bug in MS-Client, DNS does not work by default, nor is it possible to configure or enable it through the setup utility; this must be done manually. Substitute the appropriate values for your network, and be sure to separate the octets with spaces as shown above rather than periods as would be done on modern systems.

Finally, run the above command now to start the Microsoft domain name resolver. You can verify DNS is working properly with ping again:. All of this work will now let us finally do something very important: map shared network drives. This is especially useful as we can use this to easily copy files and install new applications and drivers without floppy disks. To map a drive, assuming you already have a shared drive properly configured in Samba or a Windows server which is outside the scope of this HOWTO , run:.

Again, assuming everything has been properly setup on the server, and that you logged in with proper credentials, this should just work; you'll get a "command completed successfully" message if it did. To test, try running dir e: and verify that you get output. If it doesn't as expected, and you followed all instructions above, the error is most likely on the server side. I've had mixed results myself - on my initial testing with MS-Client about three years ago , I was able to get this working perfectly with Samba; this time, however, I can't.

The final bit of network setup we're going to do for the NDIS driver is installing a "shim" packet driver. This is necessary if you want to use both Microsoft including mapped drives and non-Microsoft network utilities on the system which is highly recommended.

Also, while the driver itself works great, the whole concept is a hack and as a result requires a manual and rather complicated setup process. Save your changes to protocol. Add the following after "ifshlp. As a result, this command is no longer needed, and will in fact cause errors if you try to run it with the other drivers already loaded. This is also a good time to decide whether or not you want to automatically map shared drives on boot.

If you do not plan on using shared drives, or you prefer to map them manually each time they're needed which can be done by simply running net start , comment out the following line to save a fair amount of conventional memory:.

Finally, reboot to load the new driver. You should see the following message during the boot process to confirm the shim driver was loaded:. Fortunately, both stacks can installed and enabled simultaneously, so we'll setup both.

Edit the values as appropriate, then save and close the file. Finally, add the following line to autoexec. Run the above command now to manually set the configuration variable. Next, let's install a couple diagnostic utilities. Copy tcpinfo. The top line should state, "Reading Waterloo TCP configuration file," which indicates that it was able to find your config file.

The network parameters output by tcpinfo should either match your static configuration, or should be appropriate for your DHCP network. To test, try the following:. Finally, add the following to autoexec. If you are using a static address you can skip the dhcp line in autoexec. Run those autoexec. To test, copy ping. It's time install a few essential network applications.

Quite a few exist, but these are the ones I find most useful. I primarily run Linux systems, so SSH is very important to me. It can be downloaded from the link above. If you setup both of these as instructed earlier, you're already good to go.

Run ssh username servername to verify SSH works as well. If you're having any trouble with your WATTCP apps, or you want to poke around to see what other options are available, take a look at the included wattcp. If you decide to edit and use this version of the file, you can either replace the existing wattcp. CFG variable in autoexec. This is a command line download manager that can download files from pretty much any web or FTP server and, happily, there's a DOS version available from the link above though the DOS version is no longer maintained at this point.

Now let's install some mTCP applications. Each of these will utilize your mTCP configuration file so you can go ahead and use them directly. You can use this to automatically set your computer's clock to the correct current time, which is very handy on ancient computer hardware with bad CMOS batteries. After running the above, you should see your current system time as well as the current NTP server time listed as "Time should be set to".

To actually set the time, use the -set parameter. To always set your system clock to the appropriate time on boot strongly recommended , add the above, with -set to autoexec.

Bonus tip: once you get the mTCP utilities installed, try running telnet towel. Feel free to play around with the others, though. The bad news is that you lose the ability to concurrently use many but apparently not all other PD-based applications. The reason is that XFS installs it's own driver literally on top of your packet driver, which conflicts with most other PD applications. If you only otherwise use NDIS-based applications, this is not an issue.

If you only use PD-based applications, theoretically you should be able to get them to work with the XFS driver loaded by configuring them to use interrupt vector 0x62 instead of 0x60 search for "redirected PKTDRVR" in xfs.

See the end of this section for an alternative approach that you can use instead. It was a commercial program, but as noted above it's long since been abandoned, so grab a copy if you're so inclined and let's get to work. Note: Before installing, take a look at kernels. Note that XFS requires a local hostname to be set. Author Info Last Updated: January 7, Purchase the DOS installation disks they come in a set of 3 floppy disks. Usually you can purchase the set of floppy disks and an external floppy disk drive if needed for a very affordable price.

Insert the first installation disk in the floppy disk drive and restart your computer. The first disk is a bootable disk so you should see an option to hit a key to boot from the disk the exact key can vary depending on which computer you have. Hit the key to boot from the floppy drive.

Your computer will abandon the usual boot process and instead you will see a blue screen with Microsoft DOS setup menu. Press the Enter key on your keyboard to continue with the setup process. Select "Configure first hard disk recommended " by hitting the Enter key again. Read the information on the Caution window. You may want to consider the following options before continuing to install DOS. Press F3 if you want to back up your files.

You will be exited from the DOS installation process. Hit the Escape key if you want to return to the previous window to review your choices. Wait while your system configurations are checked.

After configuration check has completed your hard drive will be formatted using the FAT16 file system. Press the "Y" key on your keyboard if you want to continue installing DOS.

The setup program will now continue to configure your hard drive and then restart your computer. You can use your cursor keys to change the selections. If all settings are correct, you can highlight "The settings are correct" and press Enter. Install DOS in the default directory by leaving the directory location unchanged in the next window and just hitting Enter. Let your computer copy the files from the first installation disk. A status bar will appear so you can see the progress. Cookie Settings.

Learn why people trust wikiHow. Download Article Explore this Article parts. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Author Info Last Updated: June 9, Part 1. This can be done with a quick search on a search engine. Part 2. When you get to this screen you have two options. You can install Windows from a floppy disk or a CD. Check the methods below to see which one is applicable for you. Part 3. Follow the installation instructions for your operating system. Part 4.

Insert the floppy disk for your desired Windows operating system into the computer.