Hello friends of old-school technology ;-)

Did you ever want an MS-DOS that is newer than 6.22, but without Windows around it? Microsoft never sold one – the last MS-DOS lives inside Windows 95, 98 and ME. msdosinst builds it for you: a set of four bootable 1.44 MB floppy images that install MS-DOS 7.1 with the GeosOne Dual Installer.

How it works:

• disk 1 boots and starts the setup (licenses, options)
• no drive C: yet? FDISK starts, the computer restarts and the setup continues
• C: not formatted? FORMAT
• SYS C:, MS-DOS to C:\DOS from four disks, new CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT
• then further software from other disks (for example AHCIASPI) in the same run

What is on the disks:

• the system is MS-DOS 7.1 of Windows 98 SE, with a small IO.SYS (small-io-sys) and “MS-DOS 7.1” instead of “Windows 98” in the messages
• the newest MS-DOS programs of Windows ME and 98 SE, plus the MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 95 “OLDMSDOS” programs that are not in them, and the Windows 3.x programs of MS-DOS 6.22
• FDISK shows 100 GB disks and more correctly, FORMAT shows the size of large disks correctly, and FORMAT /S works again
• options: HIMEM, EMM386, German keyboard and country, DOSSHELL, MEMMAKER, MSBACKUP, SHARE for Windows 3.x and more

The set is German so far, the setup included.

The project contains no Microsoft programs. You need your own, licensed CDs and disks (Windows ME, 98 SE and 95 German, MS-DOS 6.22 with the Supplemental Disk). The PowerShell script mkdosset.ps1 (Windows or Linux) takes the files from them, as ISO images, 7-Zip archives or plain files, and writes the disk images.

Project Page

Release Page

Have fun with it.

If you find any bugs, you can keep them ;-)

mfg

Mario