DOS boot CD

[rallynavvie]

I bought an older laptop a while back for wireless surfing, remotely connecting to my home computer, and tuning the engine computer in my car. However I've just realized that my engine computer's DOS-based tuning software won't work when running inside WinXP according to the manufacturer so I need to find a way to run it another way. I looked at dual-booting but I've already got XP on there and don't want to waste what little hard drive space I've got on there for another OS volume. Plus it takes forever for Partition Magic to re-partition old laptop drives.

However there must be a way to make a bootable CD with an old version of Windows like 95 or even just a DOS disk that boots directly into the tuning software. That way I could just set my laptop BIOS to always try booting from CD first and just make sure I don't have a non-system CD in otherwise (I actually hardly ever use the CD drive on the laptop anyway). I'm leaning more toward the DOS boot solution since the software itself is DOS based.

I know you can create a DOS boot floppy, but what do you need to do in order to make a bootable CD with DOS that will autorun right into the tuning software?

[Supreme2k]

Create an ISO from your DOS boot floppy (WinISO, among others), add the tuning software, then edit the autorun.ini file (or create a bat file with the desired parameters), and stick that in the ISO. Finally, burn the ISO to CD.

Also, here's a site that may help automate the process a bit

Here's another one

[rallynavvie]

I'll give it a shot with Nero and the DOS 6.22 ISO that was on that second link. Thanks!

[pfh]

This might be better: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

[BobV]

Try this location: http://www.bootdisk.com Tons of good stuff there.

[rallynavvie]

So I've got an ISO of DOS 6.x now and I've seen that Nero has a Boot CD setting which needs a bootable image in order to act as a "template". Now when I use the DOS ISO as the template I'm guessing I choose emulation as "hard drive emulation" since floppy emulation wouldn't work as all the files required are larger than a floppy image can manage. There are a couple other advanced settings that I'll just leave as is. Now when I finally get to the screen to copy files to the new CD Nero shows the CD as blank and I don't know if it is putting the files from the ISO template in there in addition to what I'm adding to the blank CD project. I guess I'll just have to try one and find out if it works.

However what is the autorun on startup file I should be making. When all of you were using DOS I was learning resource fork editing (I was a Mac user first, PC user second) so I'm not terribly familiar with DOS. Is there a BAT or INI template I should be using so that the tuning program launches automatically when the laptop boots to the CD?

[stiltman]

You need to add the commands to the autoexec.bat not the autorun.inf. Autorun is for windows

example
cd folder (folder were the tunning software is on the CD)
tune.exe


BTW, what I would do,

Create a DOS boot disk
Modify the autoexec.bat file to start your program from a CD
Boot computer with the floppy and the CD containing the program to see if it will work.
If it does, modify autoexec.bat to point to the same location the file will be. IE just do a "cd" to the folder
Then burn a new CD using the Floppy as the DOS source...no need to make an iso of it.

BTW2, the iso and or floppy is turn into a cat file in some burning programs.

[rallynavvie]

Can't use the floppy option otherwise I already would have done so, I've got no floppy drive on my laptop.

And now that I'm thinking of it in order to have the CD drive in I have to remove the second battery slot and rely on the aging main battery (which I'll need to replace one of these days) which only lasts an hour or two. I have a DC adapter for the car but I'm thinking I need to partition off a chunk of the HDD in whatever partitioning format DOS uses and use a bootloader or something to choose between them. If I decide to datalog then I don't think the DOS boot CD will see the NTFS hard drive or if it does it won't be able to write to it. Plus running only the hard drive will allow me to have both batteries in.

[rallynavvie]

I made a boot CD that worked successfully but it didn't seem to fix my problem with accessing the serial port. I think I'm just going to dig up either my old 98SE or 2k CD and dual boot that and XP. I'm just wondering what kind of performance hit my already slow laptop will take having two partitions with different file systems on them. I've got a 15GB drive so that's probably plenty of room since with XP and the apps I had on there it was only using 7GB. The older OS will only be used to run the DOS software so pretty much just the OS for room required. Or should I just make a really small FAT partition and load the latest DOS kernel on it to save room? I seriously only need that older OS for the programming software alone.

[RabidDog]

Beware.. if you have XP already installed and THEN add win/98 or win/95 it is very likely you will lose your xp part. The Thing is XP "knows" win/98 and win/95 as its daddy, but 98/95 dont "know" about their illegitimate son (XP).. and will simply overwrite the MBR. I think part magic is your Best bet. Oh and get ready to sell your Main PC to buy a new car engine ... (15% overclocks on engine management systems dont work)

[rallynavvie]

Oh and get ready to sell your Main PC to buy a new car engine ... (15% overclocks on engine management systems dont work)

WTF are you talking about? The engine management unit is standalone, the latop just interfaces with it to tune everything.

I'm aware that the newest OS needs to be installed last when multi-booting. I just need to hear from some people their experiences with performance when dual-booting. The old laptop isn't very fast, the hard drive fairly slow. The bootable disc option just won't work since I really need to be able to write to disk for datalogging and need both batteries in so I don't need to have the car adapter plugged in.

[Bjs]

Try using one of those rescue cds on the net , you can add your program to it and add it into the menu so its eay too access , then see how you go .

[rallynavvie]

I actually just installed Win2k on it and left it at that. The only thing that I really miss about XP on the laptop is the easier hot-swapping (no silly messages about unsafe removal of devices). I already switched out my startup screen to something cooler than the bright-ass white Win2k one. Though it takes longer to reboot it runs a lot quicker than XP and goes in and out of sleep and hibernate a lot easier. I think Win2k makes for a good operating system on an old laptop.

Although I wonder why the tuning software wouldn't work on XP but does on 2k? I thought it was perhaps NTFS somehow causing trouble with the old DOS application, but I formatted Win2k for NTFS when I installed it. Was there some strange thing they did to the serial ports from 2k to XP?