Hello, I know that this is probably really easy to do, but I need to knowhow to put dos 5 on my external hard drive (F) so I can install windows 3.1 on it. When I boot up in dos from a floppy disk and try to goto drive F it just says "Invalid Drive Specification". My old internal hard drive got fried and now I want to run win3.1 on it from my external hdd. If it makes any difference, the cooked hdd used to dual boot with win me and win xp. The ext. hdd is 80gb and not partitioned Cheers

"I know that this is probably really easy to do, but I need to knowhow to put dos 5 on my external hard drive (F) so I can install windows 3.1 on it." Not really, if you already have an OS (and you mention XP in your specs). Use a virtual machine. Much simpler, and you risk damaging your XP installation by trying to install an older OS on a newer machine (which isn't up to the task of an external drive anyway). I'd recommend MSVPC2K4: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

If you want dos 5 and 3.1 then get an old 2 gig drive off ebay and use that. Dos wouldn't know what to do with 80 gig of HD space. Or, if your internal drive is fried and you only have an external you could take the drive out of the external case and use it internally. Then install XP and virtual machine as T-R-A recommends.

Unless the external is scsi, pcmcia or other supported adapter you can't get it to work. If supported you have to tell us what type external it is. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10