I have a Dell Latitude D610 laptop with a SCSI hard drive. It came from Dell with Windows XP SP2 in a large NTFS partition and a smaller FAT16 partition for recovery. I used gparted to shrink the NTFS partition by 500MB, create a new FAT32 primary partition and installed FreeDOS. Also installed the GAG bootloader. So now I can boot FreeDOS or XP. I’d also like to install PC DOS 6.3. I reduced the size of the NTFS partition by another 600MB and created another FAT32 partition. Thought I could use Disk #1 of the PC DOS set to boot and load PC DOS on the 600M partition. But no . . . nothing is simple. I get this error message: “PC DOS 6.3 files cannot be installed on your hard disk because all the primary partition table entries on your disk are already in use.” I understand that a hard drive can have as many as 4 primary partitions. Gparted shows 4 partitions although (as far as I can determine) it does not identify them as primary or otherwise. The fdisk utility shows paritition 1 to be Non-DOS (that’s the Dell recovery partition); partition 2 is the NTFS partition; partition 3 is D:, PRI DOS FAT32; and partition 4 is C:, PRI DOS FREEDOS. I tried deleting the 600MB partition to see if the PC DOS installation would find the unallocated space and create its own partition. But I get the same error message as noted above. What do I do with the ”primary partition table entries on your disk are already in use” error message? Any advice as to how to get PC DOS 6.3 on the machine as one of the GAG choices to boot to? Thanks. Steve

Only one prime partition can be active at one time. You need to make sure the partition you are installing PCDOS to is not hidden and is the active partition. Also (correct me if I am wrong) PCDOS 6.3 needs to be installed on a fat16. Run fdisk or other partition maneger and convert the spare fat32 to fat16 and make sure it is active.

The only forms of DOS that support fat32 are usually labeled dos 7.1 (eg pcdos 7.1, drdos 7.05, dldos 7.1 &c. You can easily make c: drive less than 500 MB, which everyone will leave as fat16. You need to make this the primary partition, as well. It is possible to dual boot pc-dos and winxp on the same system, because ntldr will detect pcdos as well. However, programs like bootpart etc only make boot-sectors for ms-dos. You could try, for example, the dfsee proggie, a shareware fdisk thing, or some kind of 3rd party boot manager. You will prolly need this if you plan to have freedos as well. (it can live in the pcdos partition as well under this). W The dream you dream alone is only a dream, The dream we dream together is reality.