• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

W98 disk and DOS

W

woodchips

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 4, 2012
Messages
423
Location
UK
This has got me. Was never a great user of W95 or W98.

My DOS laptop has died, and need another. Got a Dell with W98 on it but when I boot from floppy the C: drive is invisible, why? I thought that it would just appear and I could look to see what was on it under DOS?

Tried another industrial 486 but the same.

How do I gain access to the hard disc to reformat it and put DOS 5 on it please?
 
WIN98 has formatted your HD with FAT-32 so DOS 6.22 and lower can't read the HD. If you boot with a DOS 7 disk you will have access to the HD.
 
FDISK should be able to remove the FAT32 partition.

What drive is in the laptop?

The problem is that any drive that benefits from FAT32 is at the large size for DOS 5's FAT16 format. You will probably wind up with multiple 2GB partitions and very big cluster sizes so lots of wasted space. What software are you running that needs DOS 5 because it can't run on Win9x?
 
Just a note: it has to be MS-DOS 7.1 as used with Windows 95 OSR 2, or Windows 98 FE/SE. MS-DOS 7.0 provided with Windows 95 RTM does not support FAT-32.
 
Aghhhh! Obvious isn't it. Completely forgot that it used 32 bit access.

I will just reformat the disc, nothing on it I want. I only want 800MB, the disc size in the dead laptop.

Laptop has all my PCB designs, software etc for the products I still sell and support from the early 90's. I did move to Windows based software, the reason for the laptop, but I could never remember how to use the newer version of the software because the complexity was much greater. If you use something continually then you remember, 9 months and it has all gone. Actually nothing lacking in the DOS versions for what I wanted to do.

Thanks everyone.
 
You can also use FreeDOS, which features FAT32 support.

I use Win98SE's DOS and include the DOSLFN driver in my CONFIG.SYS, which gives me long file name APIs in DOS mode. I rarely use Win98SE in GUI mode myself, although there are a lot of 32-bit applications that have to problem executing with Japheth's HXDOS add-on.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top