Microsoft MS-DOS 7.1

1999 · operating-system · Windows · MS-DOS · Microsoft

Introducing MS-DOS 7.1, the version of MS-DOS that never existed officially. Requiring a 386 CPU to boot, it was only ever intended to be used with Windows 9x, and never on its own, however this distribution aims to make it a standalone product that can be used if you wish to do so. IMPORTANT: Choosing to setup DOS 7.1 from the boot menu will format whatever drive is C:, so please make sure nothing important is on your HD, and that you have prepped a suitable C: partition with FDISK by booting without CD support. While you can choose to manually install DOS 7.1 onto a C: drive of your choosing, you may be greeted with the Windows 98 boot logo during boot. Using this built-in installer will ensure that MSDOS.SYS is modified to prevent this as the boot disk has pre-prepped configuration files once installed to C: including hiding the boot logo and proper paths. I intend to make this more interactive and implement elements of the official installer, if possible, but for now this is how it installs. (You can peek at MSDOS.C to see what options are required in MSDOS.SYS once installed if you do a manual installation). WINDOWS 3.1/3.11: If you do wish to use Windows 3.1, you will want to patch win386.exe or you may end up with a corrupted FAT32 filesystem (Google for the patch, it's well known on Vogons). UPDATE: I have released an R2 version of the disk image, including a supplemental disk. The first image is missing the EDIT help file, and had room for more utilities, so R2 includes the missing help file and more utilities, cleaned up the SETUP script a little, and included a supplemental disk to include additional extras including QBASIC. To run the supplemental disk, simply insert it and type INSTALL. Since this distribution currently only installs to C:\DOS the supplemental disk will assume so as well.