I have DOS 6.22 on 3 floppies. As we all know, floppies are very fragile, and these have been around for about 12 years now, so I'd like to burn the files from all 3 floppies onto 1 cd from which I can boot and install DOS. I will be burning the cd with Nero from an XP machine. I tried simply copying all the files into a folder and burning onto a cd, but the pc didn't recognize anything from which I could boot. Help anyone? Thanks.

I don't know if it is possible to create a CD-ROM installation from the 3 DOS 6.22 install diskettes. The first problem is that you will have to put a CD-ROM driver on disk 1 and change the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to load the CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX.exe to enable DOS to read from the CD. Next, DOS setup will install the files from disk 1 and then request you insert disk 2 to continue the installation. When you hit "enter" to continue the installation, the first thing DOS setup does is check the disk label of the disk and needs to see "DISK______2" (______ = 6 spaces) as the label of that disk or it won't continue the installation. Same thing for disk 3, it has to be labeled "DISK______3" in order for the setup program to use it. I don't know how you could have the CD-ROM change labels during the install. You'd have to somehow "re-program" the setup program to change how it works. If you can't figure out how to do that, just do what I do and save your DOS 6.22 diskettes as floppy disk images (I use wimage, a free utility) and save those images to a CD-ROM (just put them on some kind of backup CD-ROM with a bunch of other stuff). You can then create a new set of DOS 6.22 installation diskettes from the CD-ROM anytime your existing disks start to fail.

PC-DOS was available on CD, therefore it may be prudent to download and understand how IBM achieved that goal: ftp://ftp.boulder.ibm.com/software/dos

First, your machine would have to be El Torito compatible (able to boot from CD). But you could always make a boot disk (still floppy, yes, but 1 is better than 3 of them) to load the CD-ROM drivers, and then copy the files to the hard-drive and install from there, even with the 6.22 upgrade.. (see response 3 from below:) http://www.computing.net/answers/do...

I kind of disagree. Almost any floppy can be installed on a CD if the bios of the computer normally can boot to a cd. I used to use beos shell to cat /dev/floppy/raw > filename then take filename and copy it to track one of the cd. Linux has similar commands that would work. I think most people use dd. Might work with rawread for win/unix. See any of the docs for ultimate boot cd or even barts work on specialized cd's. All sorts of OS's can be put on a cd and booted. With all that, you do realize that burned CD's are fragile also. You'd be better off saving images on cd and hard drives. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

I did this ages ago, what I did was to install DOS on a machine first with my default settings, then I copied the DOS folder and the autoexec.bat, config.sys and the WinA320.386 files over to a folder on another computer. (or as I had another operating system installed at the time copied them over to that in their own folder.) Next get make a copy of your DOS setup Disk 1. Get a cd-rom driver and load those onto the floppy disk and setting up the config.sys and autoexec.bat files respectively whilst removing the command Setup from autoexec.bat. Now depending on which version of Nero you us this may be different but you want to be looking for something along the lines of make bootable disc, for a cd-rom/dvd-rom (whatever your putting it onto really). Now in Nero6 as soon as you do that it opens up a tab asking where you want to get the boot image data from, choose your floppy drive and insert the copy of disk 1 with the cd-rom driver, next give the disc a label if you want and then setup the rest as normal. When you click on next the file explorer will be brought up simply select your folder containing the DOS files (as I say put the actual folder called DOS in a folder of it's own as you also need the 3 files from the root of the drive) and drag it over and burn. Then if the system has got cd-rom boot capabilities, insert disc and boot from it. Run Fdisk if you need to make a partition, reboot then format. Then simply switch to the directory on your cd with the dos files, make a folder called DOS on your partition copy all the files from the DOS folder on the cd to the hard drive then copy the autoexec,config,wina320 to the root of the drive and finally remove cd and reboot. I know it sounds complex but it's really easy to do, if you have a pre-formatted drive you can load dos over in about 2 mins or less.