Although I thought it was common knowledge that DOS(pre-ver7.x) could only access partitions within 8gb, from what I have read here, it looks like a few of you deny this fact. ...or maybe I have misunderstand and there is a solution. Example.. I have MSDOS 5.0 and 6.22 installed on primarys on a 40gb drive. When running either install, I can access logicals ONLY if those logicals reside in an extended partition that does NOT cross the 8gb mark of the hard drive. If I resize the extended partition past 8gb either with unused space or with more logical partitions, DOS cannot access ANY of the logical drives. Is there a way around this? I would like to leave the DOS installs on the drive and have access to at least 1 logical partition, yet be able to utilize the entire disk via other OSs. ??

"Is there a way around this?" Not likely: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/sizeGB8.html

install ms-dos 7.10 you don't have to get wengiers dos to do this. just get a boot disk for win95osr2 or win98 and do a sys c: you will have access to your entire hard disk if you hope to run windows 3.x you can apply the 3xstart patch if you want to feel that you are really running dos, you can even hex edit command.com and io.sys so that all references to windows are changed to ms-dos. i donot wish to sign

"Is there a way around this?" Only a better DOS. Try Free-DOS, enhanced DR-DOS from Udo Kuhnt, or PTS-DOS. The so-called M$-DOS 7.10 would probably work also, but it is NOT distributed separately and not legal if you don't have a LEGAL licence for Winedows 98.

Thanks for the info. I guess I understood the limitations correctly, but was hoping for one of those querky out of the blue solutions. Sometimes they just don't exist, but it is always worth the effort to find out. I decided to dig up a 6.4GB drive just for DOS/windos installs. Ghosting OSs over to it now. Its gonna be a tight sqweeze. I'm one of those multi-boot freaks. I have Wengier's DOS, PTSDOS-32 and enh-DR-DOS up and running... all three run fine installed on logicals (ghosted w/hidden sector fix) and deal with just about whatever I throw at them when it comes to partitions and drive size. (within reason..of course) I do believe DR-DOS (not enhanced) will run from a logical. I am going to try that out, along with freeDOS. I'm but a noob when it comes to setting up and running DOS, but I get time to play no and then. PTSDOS-32 is interesting, but it seems a bit qwerky. Enhanced DRDOS would probably be the cat's meow, but (corrct me if I am wrong) It seems that it does not support memory managment. Wengier's DOS is a neat little OS "hack". I'm glad that I got as hold of it when it was easily available. I have installed it over win9x just for chits n giggles and also ran WFW with it. Goingto play around with it some more. Still I found it not as capatible with win3x and some software compared to good old 6.22. M$DOS 5.0 seems to be the latest version that will run win2x/win1x, ...fun to show off that old junk once in awhile. Anyway... again, thanks for the quick responses!

You say "Still I found it not as capatible with win3x and some software compared to good old 6.22. " Everything I tried works 100% with Wengier's DOS 7.1, what have you come across that didn't work.

FYI you cannot run win 3.x with freedos in enhanced mode, but you can run it in standard mode ie. win /s i donot wish to sign