Hi, I was wondering if it was possible to install dos from a cd. I have backed up all my dos and windows floppies to a cd (msdos 1-6.22 and win 1-95b upg) and made it bootable using a win95 bootcd with cd and mouse support. once booted i go into w:\dos\dos6(or whatever\disk1 and type setup it says insert boot disk and restart, then i get the win95 boot thing and have to start from the beginning. I was wondering if there was some way of creating bootloader that will let me choose which os to install and also allow me to continue setup. ps I have all the original floppies but due to the nature of floppies being easier to become corrupted i thought it would be safer to backup to cd as i don't want to lose them although i will probably never use dos 1 again. cheers for any help

Storing the original DOS 6.22 floppies onto a CD to preserve them from corruption is a good idea. I suggest to store them as "images", i.e. files holding the native structure of the media including the boot sector, so you can restore the real diskettes from their soft archives. WinImage (shareware) and other tools (free) can be found on the Web. About installing DOS directly from a CD that can not be achieved as the original Setup installer checks for diskette labels and does not allow to select a source Drive/Directory. I'm working on that issue and hope to find a way to implement it without hacking Setup, but there is a lot of work to be done even if I think to be on the rigth way.

I agree with IVO. I have CD/R arcives of many version of DOS & Windows, ready to re-create or repair diskettes from images as required. I use WinImage (www.winimage.com) which is still availabe foe Win3x as well as Win9x Disk Copy Pro for DOS is also a good all round image manager. A shareware version can be found on my Bootdisk Project page. Please reply with a message to let us all know we are on the right track...

Hi, I just downloaded winimage and and disk copy and will try them when i get some time. I copied dos 6.22 to some floppies and tried to install but i got an invalid system system disk so i am glad i posted here as they would have been unusable if the original floppies became corrupt. so cheers On another point i looked at the msdos timeline on your site mick c and it says that the first msdos was 1.25 yet mine says 1.1, is it just the same thing but a different name?

http://newdos.yginfo.net/msdos71/ Look for the ISO image of the dos 7.1 install and bootable cd.It is compatible with all Win 3.X.Freedos also has an ISO dos install cd.These cd's can be used on systems that do not readily boot from cdrom with a boot disk found on the respective web site.Freedos is not meant to be compatible with Microsoft products like Win 3.1 but is by itself a good freeware alternative at no cost to the user.The Freedos beta 9 r5 installation setup from cd is very easy to use compared to past releases. http://www.freedos.org/ Good luck.

<kebabs> Microsoft produced all the early versions of DOS both PC-DOS & MS-DOS. The first released version of MS-DOS is reported as v1.25 for Zenith which had IBMBIO.SYS & IBMDOS.SYS as you would expect for PC-DOS. Problem is, unless you have the original diskettes, you cannot tell the differance between early PC-DOS & MS-DOS - So yes you may well have a copy of MS-DOS 1.1 As you say, many of the early versions just had differant version numbers for differant costumers. If you have the diskettes (5¼"?), A scan of the disk labels would be welcome. Please reply with a message to let us all know we are on the right track...