my friend just bought an old 486. how can I install dos and win 3.11 on his hard drive when his hard drive is connected to my computer? I'm running win98. I have formatted his drive but am having a hell of a time getting dos on it. I got dos 6.22 from a web site mentioned on this forum but it will not install. It opens a window and says" hit ctrl+alt+delete" and setup will resume, but I get "invalid system disk" error when I reboot. Any help will save what hair on my head that I have not already pulled out.

If you formatted his drive with win98 format it will not work with dos6.22 because win98 runs under dos7.10. you need to make a startup disk from dos6.22 and format his drive and then install dos6.22 then win3.11

Hi fricker: JPW is correct about formating using DOS 6.22 or earlier. Win 95 & later usally use FAT 32, where DOS 6.22 uses FAT 16 to setup your hard drive, that's why you can't install your OS. Good luck. Z

If your Windows 98 already exisits on the disk (im assuming it's on a fat32 partition), an earlier FDISK won't recognize it as a DOS partition and will allow you to create a primary Fat-16 on on the same disk. You can then use a boot manager to switch between the two versions of DOS. FDISK 7.1 recognizes both FATs as belonging to DOS and won't allow this, even though true MS-DOS 5+ have built-in support for multiple primary DOS partitions. You can even use a utility that lets you define up to four primary partitions at once- Linux' fdisk is an example of such a program. Powerquest Partition Magic 3.1 is another, and even comes with IBM's useful boot manager.