Trouble making a DOS-bootable drive

[bitfixer]

Hi,

I think I need a little refresher on DOS.
I was just putting together a disk-imaging station, consisting of an AMD K6 motherboard with 360k 5.25 drive, 3.5 1.44M drive, CD-ROM and an 18 Gig IDE drive.
I would like to make the HD bootable to dos 6.22, and have Imagedisk and other disk imaging tools on it.

I seem to be having some issues making the hard drive bootable. What have I done wrong here?
I made a 3.5" bootdisk for DOS 6.22, and booted the machine from it.
Fdisk'ed the drive, and created a 2047MB primary dos partition, and allocated the remainder as extended DOS with a few logical drives.
Then, after a reboot, I did "format c: /s" to format the primary dos partition.
Afterwards, as expected, C: is empty except for command.com.

But now when I try to boot from the drive, I just get "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT".
I can always just boot from floppy, but it would be nicer to boot from the drive.. is there something I've forgotten here?
Thanks!
- Mike

 

[bitfixer]

Well, I figured it out. The C: partition was not active.
I had a second hard drive in the machine which had a winXP install on it which was registering as drive 1. So I removed it in the BIOS and then set the right partition active. Hopefully this will help if someone else runs into this issue.

 

[RickNel]

I just went through a similar problem setting up an extra HDD to boot DOS 6.22, for the same purposes as you involving access to 5.25 floppies. It happened to be a SD card in an IDE adapter.

I found that I could only boot DOS if it was the primary partition on the disk. Once I had rearranged the order of the drives in BIOS, I could add the DOS-booting disk to the multiboot options I had already set up on the main HDD, since I have Linux in an extended partion, WinXP in the primary, and use the Linux boot utility GRUB to give a boot menu offering XP, DOS or Linux.

Rick