How to make a MS DOS 6.22 USB boot drive

hello thank you for checking out my video today today's video is to answer the question i keep getting and that is how to put ms-dos on a usb drive now i typically just copy an image to a usb drive and i'm done but i realize not everybody has one so this is gonna be the really hard way to do it it's not the only way but it's a way that i know so we're gonna we've got our usb drive here it's a uh 64 megabyte drive but i don't usually make the drive as big as 64 megabyte just because for my computer project it's a little bit too big so anyway the first thing you're going to want to do is download yourself a ms-dos boot desk and you go to this all bootdisk.com web page here and they've got some boot disks for you so you can download ms-dos 6.22 and ask where to save it now i'm going to be using dosbox to do this and so i need to save it in a certain location for me to be able to find it for dosbox so i'm going to save it in here and let's just open up that location as you can see it came in as dos 6.22 and that dot in there we need to get rid of that so here's the one that i made earlier and i just took the dot out of it so that it can be mounted correctly so let's just rename that now this this boot image has everything you need to make a bootable hard drive now we need to make our hard drive image so i made an hd image here we'll just delete that so i'm going to show you that i'm making this completely from scratch so using nasm which is an assembler i'm going to create a empty file so let's just create a text document here and we'll call it hd dot asm now we're going to open that in the text editor and all we're going to do is type in times 0x 0 let's go one zero zero zero zero so that would be one megabyte and one more zero would make 16 megabytes let me make sure i count that right for yeah that should be 16 megabyte and then we're gonna just put in a value of zero and save that so what this is gonna do is create an empty file that's 16 megabytes full of zeros let's just go ahead and exit that let's go with command prompt and we'll type in nasm hd dot i a sm and we're output we'll do hd dot img let's take a look and see if that did that right so i can find it in here hd right here let's just check on the size properties so i made a one megabyte yes so let's uh let's go back to our text document here and put enough and let's put another zero in there and we'll go back and okay now let's check the size here properties and you can see that says it's 16 megabyte so for me this is the quickest easiest way to make an empty file um now let's copy this to the same location as our images so now we've got our dos 622 boot disk here and our empty hard drive image here now we need a boot dos box now but we need to go into the dosbox options and you know i'm kind of expecting people to understand dosbox to an extent and so i'm not going to be explaining everything that you absolutely have to do so what we're going to do down here at the very bottom you see it says auto exact and we're going to put in some mounting instructions so i'm going to mount a drive to letter h and it's mapped to c colon dos which is where i have saved my images and then i'm going to go to the h drive and i'm going to do an image mount the dos 62 floppy and then image mount and when it has no file system like this you have to put a 2 and file system none now your geometry you wonder about that now this is important so well i mean you can be off a little it doesn't seem to make a huge difference but the 5 12 6 3 and 16 never change but the last number does so if you come here to image mount it'll tell you this is the dos box help tells you how to put it in there but really simply what you want to do is 512 times 64 times 16. see it's 63 but it starts at zero so it's 64. and that gives us a number of uh 524 thousand 288. now if you take that number and let's go 16 million divided by that number it gives us roughly 30. and that's how i calculate that so if you did like a 32 you come in here and or sorry 32 megabyte drive you come in here you can figure out what your uh that last digit needs to be and that's where i got the 30 for mounting that drive so now let's uh turn on dosbox it looks like everything mounted okay i'm going to make this full screen okay so we're going to want to boot from our a drive now i didn't modify the disk at all so it's going to try to do a cd drive and all that which i don't have now we type in fdisk and let's display the partition information it shows there's nothing on that hard drive so let's just create a partition and we'll just create a primary now let's just use the maximum size and we're done now it's going to reboot so now we're going to try this again we're going to boot so i'm just booting from the a drive again so we've created our partition on that hard drive image so let's format c colon and then we're going to type sys we had to put in a parameter c c colon system transferred okay now let's turn off dosbox again we'll boot up one more time but this time we're going to try to boot letter c and there you go it's booting ms-dos and her date and her time you're done now i'm not going to put an auto exact or anything this is it now if you see i've got an image down below that says ch for the hard drive down below it's just commented out that pound sign so don't worry about that anyway now we have our image correctly built i'm going to plug in my usb drive to my computer here and take a minute to mount it and i use a program called rufus to write the image you can see that it shows the device as a 64 megabyte drive i'm going to select the hard drive image out of c colon dos that's the same one that i was working with the bigger the images take a little bit longer but there you go it just create the image on the the drive i just unplugged it and now i'm going to plug it in to my homemade pc here i just moved it over and we'll turn it on and we're going to let this boot up all right see if we can get that where you can see it and you can see it says starting ms-dos and it's asking for the date and time and there you go so that's how you create a bootable usb drive using dosbox and a floppy image so thanks for checking out my video today

Channel: EMM Computers

Views: 20,749

Keywords: MS DOS, IBM PC, 8088, IBM 5150, 8086

Id: 99yuySOwhxY

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 02 2022