I prefer not to play around with partitioning hard disks and setting bootable partitions (except on a new computer with nothing on it just yet) - you can do a lot of damage with those things.
There is a flavour of FreeDOS which comes charging over the hill to the rescue- you can
boot from one floppy, and everything you need is there, no need to partition your hard disk
at all.
As with ALL flavours of DOS if you do wish to use your hard disk, this one needs a FAT file
system to write to - but if you have an NTFS XP hard drive, you may be able to avoid
creating a FAT partition by running dos programs from cd, dvd or floppy. If you do this
with a floppy disk, FreeDOS will be more stable if you copy the files cmd80x86.com and
command.com from the FreeDOS floppy onto the program floppy as these
files contain transient dos elements.
If you have a bit of hard disk set up to use a FAT file system, you can use that to install dos programs or to make data available to dos programs. My hard disks use several file systems (fat16, fat32, reisser 3, ext 2) to take advantage of each ones best features for various OS I use.
A useful free and easy alternative.... likely to run on ANY PC (possibly even an XT if there are any museums interested...). FreeDOS.
NOTE that FreeDOS can support Soundblaster cards (dos drivers MAY be required!) or equivalent but does not support the more modern sound chips (so you may have no sound, whereas DosBox running in Linux or Windows will emulate a soundblaster).
I downloaded a 1.44M image file of Odin FreeDOS from:
1.44meg Odin Freedos -
Most folks would want the 1.44meg image, which you save to hard disk.
A later version may be linked to from Odin FreeDos.
The Odin flavour requires NO hard disk install, therefore requires no hard disk partition or other dangerous activity. Everything is on the floppy you boot from.
The img file you have downloaded now needs to be placed onto a real
(formatted) floppy as a bootable image-
in Linux the command is:
dd if=/fullpathto/wheretheimagefileis/odin1440.img
of=/dev/fd0
where fd0 is the device name in my system for my floppy drive, which for the purpose of this command is unmounted (a Linux thing). It will be fd0 for the first floppy drive in almost all Linux systems.
For Windows users, they would use rawrite.exe to move the image to a formatted floppy disk, which then becomes bootable- rawrite is another freely available download (RAWrite). There is also a version of dd for Windows, which uses differing syntax to the Linux version.
You need to boot from the floppy by setting either BIOS or bootloader settings as appropriate. I prefer to have a bootmenu option with boot from floppy disabled in bios for safety.
You may need to amend the config.sys (and fdconfig.sys) and autoexec.bat on the floppy for your system but it will probably do something out of the box as it were!
To use my UK keyboard and enable DOS to use UK formats I made the following changes
to the default files:
At the end of fdconfig.sys I just added the line:
!country=044,,country.sys
Note the leading exclamation mark.
At the bottom of autoexec.bat on the floppy, I made one small addition- just
underneath the line :mouse
LH keyb /V /NOHI
uk,,keyboard.sys
(the NOHI is required as otherwise FreeDos will fall over!)
and as I was going to use one of my fat partitions for dos programs including extensions to FreeDOS I amended the SET PATH entry in autoexec.bat to point to the appropriate part of my hard disk, using the appropriate drive letter as set by FreeDos.
One of my dos additions is the excellent dir alternative DI. As this needs to be loaded
above the base 64k of ram, I needed to use loadfix, introduced in dos 5. To make life a lot
easier, I just added an alias into my autoexec.bat:
ALIAS DI=LOADFIX J:\DI
where of course the program di is in the root of my drive J (as lettered by FreeDos).
At anytime using FreeDos I just type DI and it works- it does not even have to be in the
path as we have given its full path.
Both my atapi cd drives were usable, but the system failed fairly often indicating the supplied tiny driver could be bettered - I had failures when no disk in, or if I changed the disk after reading or just for the sake of it... flaky. But it did work in a way. I must try plugging in the atapi driver on my old dos machine- but the floppy only has 28k free so I'll probably have to sacrifice something.
Most dos commands are included, and even a choice of edlin or edit. A mouse driver is included. No Basic. Windows 3 will not install over FreeDOS without problems, but both XP and Linux (via Wine) can run most W3 programs.
Once the system is loaded you have access to all your fat16 and fat32 drive partitions, but no long filenames.