Hi, It was recommended I try FreeDOS to fix my problems installing 3.1. FreeDOS in turn pointed me to Balder. I have downloaded a disk image (balder10.img) of FreeDOS but have no idea how to make a diskette with it. Can someone please enlighten me? Thanks Dave Dave

Well, I previously suggested that you look at FreeDOS.org as a source of info and DOS programs. With the idea in mind that you could maybe get the base MS-DOS OS off of a boot disk and use the freely available DOS program clones to fill in what else is needed. I have no experience of trying to actually run Windows 3.1 on FreeDOS, from what I read on the FreeDOS site it sounds a little problematic. But, I did just go to FreeDOS to find out what this "Balder" thing you were talking about is. That's the "code name" the guy putting together a "single floppy" distro of FreeDOS has given his latest version. From what I read, it sounds like he mostly works in UNIX(Linux) and created the floppy image file you have with the "dd" command. But, unless you have a working Linux, BSD, or genuine UNIX system available, describing how to write your image file to floppy using "dd" would be worthless. Check out this site for information and tools for writing disk images: http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/rawrite/ Also links to many different floppy images tools. Down the page is a direct link to get rawrite2 or rawrite3 which should be able to write your floppy image file to a disk using DOS. I have used rawrite just from a DOS box in Windows without any problems.

Thanks once again Pyro. With some more digging I found a link on this forum to DosBox and have downloaded a copy. I have another computer in the workshop with XP on it and I have just installed a network card and set it up to see the other PCs. Tomorrow I will try installing DosBox on it and theoretically I can then install 3.1 under it and all the DOS and SetVer issues should go away. http://tinyurl.com/57m69l If that works as anticipated then it will be a very clean solution. I'll keep you and the forum posted on progress. Thank you very much for the continued assistance and detailed replies. It is VERY much appreciated. Oh as it happens I do have Kubuntu v8 and Ubuntu v8. I like to keep them around as they are handy to hack around things Windoze wont let me {grin} Dave Dave

Well, best of luck. From the things I've read, it sounds like it's always tricky getting Windows 3.x to run right on anything except MS-DOS (and, of course, PC-DOS). Microsoft made it that way on purpose.