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Need Help Creating MS DOS 6.22 Boot Disks

abruno17

Experienced Member
Joined
Mar 10, 2020
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4104 Longworth Loop Kissimme, FL 34744
I have just purchased, a Tandy 1400LT and I would like to run DOS 6.22 on it since I would like to have the most up to date dos and I would like to play around with Zip Disks and other storage media that DOS 3.2 won't support. I know 6.22 cannot fit on one 720K and that is all the 1400LT has so what I do, could someone please give me the exact steps I need to make these disks. Also, I will need to include the Tandy 1400LT utilities as shown on https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Utilities_for_Tandy_Computers. I'm not really use to DOS, the last time I used it I had version 3.30 on 5 1/4" floppies when I still had a Compaq portable. Since I don't have any external 5 1/4" drive yet I need to create new boot disk on 720K disks which I have plenty of those. So again, if someone is willing to give me a step-by-step guide on how to make a MS DOS 6.22 boot disk using multiple 720K disks on my windows 11 computer I would be more than grateful.
Thank you,
Anthony
 
Are we supposed to ASSUME you are installing on a Hard Drive, or is this going to
be a Floppy Boot based System?

Can you boot from a CDR or DVD? DOS622Boot.iso is 2971648 bytes.
Code:
1362945 May 18  2013 DOS622D2.ZIP
 910612 May 18  2013 DOS622D1.ZIP
1436301 May 18  2013 DOS622D3.ZIP

Larry
 
Checking my usual sources, the only boot images are for high density floppies.

Copying the files is easy. Making the disk bootable is the hard part.

So someone needs to make you a bootable 3.5" DSDD disk image (or disk) for DOS 6.22.
 
There are 360k images for MS-DOS 6.22, at least for the upgrade. I don't know how easy it is to get these to work in a 720k drive.

However, it is definitely possible to install from the existing 1.44 MB disk images in a virtual machine (such as PCem), and create a 720 KB boot image from this installation. This boot image can then be written to a 720 KB formatted floppy to boot your machine. All other files can just be copied over; since no file is larger than 720 KB, this is easy. Or you can create your custom system disk within the virtual machine.

Or you go for MS-DOS 5.0, which is available for 720 KB disks. It also officially supports installation to floppy disks from the installer, which MS-DOS 6.2x does not support. Both versions are very similar; the main difference is that DOS 6.x ships with more tools (which you probably won't need, like MSBACKUP or MSAV) and boot menu support.

My recommendation: Stick with MS-DOS 5. Application compatibility is the same, the files are slightly smaller, and you can easily install it on your machine. If you really, really want the latest version, create a custom boot floppy in a virtual machine and use that.
 
I used to sell boot disks on ebay a few years ago but then ebay permabanned me without telling me why, presumably software piracy as the only things I was selling were these boot disks and copies of my own C64 game which I wrote.
Keep in mind this wasn't the whole DOS OS just a bootable disk with some of the dos programs on the disk, depending on the capacity of the disk.
I had different sets of utilities depending on the capacity of the disk. For a 720k disk I could squeeze onto the disk: format, fdisk, pkunzip, sys, chkdsk, attrib, mem, more, oakcdrom.sys, mscdex.exe, himem.sys, emm386.exe, pkzip.exe, xcopy, unformat, and doskey.

If you are not able to create a disk and get yourself up and running then I can make a disk for you and send it for say ... $5? that should cover the cost of shipping.
 
Hi abruno17



I use WimImage in Windows11 to convert any image file to whatever floppy format. Refer to attach picture 1, 2
You can also insert any additional files / utilities you need in that image
Then write the floppy from img.

Attachment is my MS dos6.22 bootdisk converted from 360kb floppy
 

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  • How_To_Make_Floppy_Disk_with_Winimage.pdf
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  • Dos622boot.zip
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