Document 1105 BOOTING WITH DR DOS

Initials:

BPT
10/31/91
GENERAL

Keywords:

BOOT
INSTALL

Description:

      In order to install DR DOS you must make sure that you are
      booting from a floppy in drive A:. DR DOS will not install
      from drive B:. DR DOS comes on 3 1/2 inch low density
      floppies and 5 1/4 inch Hi-density floppies. If you need
      5 1/4 inch low-density disks (360K) send in the coupon that
      comes with your DR DOS.

      If the boot disk hangs while trying to load, usually it means
      there is an incompatible or faulty piece of hardware.

One of the things it can be is simply an older floppy 
drive that is out of alignment.  Sometimes the situation
can be salvaged by formatting a floppy on the boot drive
with the old DOS, then doing a diskcopy. The potential 
problem is that the diskcopy may not be able to read the 
boot disk either. If you can't make a backup then it may 
be necessary to get a replacement disk set from Digital
Research (in case there is an actual error with the disk,
which does sometime happen) or see about getting the 
drives aligned.

• * Another problem is where you can make valid Diskcopies but all you get is the message "Loading…". Here the potential problem may be the computer's bios. DR DOS must be able to direct the system to the area where DOS Kernel files are located. Older bioses are not able to perform this function. If your bios dates from around 1987 or earlier you may need an update. **

And finally, if you can read the disks but are unable to 
format a disk or make a diskcopy DR DOS may think you 
have a different type of floppy than you actually have.
Another symptom of this is if you are making a floppy
installation and DR DOS asks you for 5 1/4" floppies
when you actually have 3 1/2" floppies. If this is an XT
      type computer (by which we mean it has no CMOS config-
uration program) then you can place a DRIVPARM state-
ment in your CONFIG.SYS. Refer to the DR DOS manual to
see how to use this parameter. DRIVPARM uses no RAM. It
merely updates the DR DOS drive tables with the type
drive you specify. If your computer does have a CMOS 
setup program then you need to correct the entries for
      your floppy drives in CMOS.