Thank you for your interest in my MS-DOS 6.22 Install CD. As you would
expect, this CD installs MS-DOS 6.22. It is much faster than the
offical installation method, completing in as little as two minutes. It
attempts to ask you as little information as possible and tries to
blast through the install as automatically as possible. Your installed
system will contain a basic MS-DOS 6.22 full install, mouse drivers,
cd-rom drivers, and the supplemental pack should you choose it. Memory
configuration is a basic HIMEM /testmem:off with DOS=HIGH,UMB - with
EMM386.EXE NOEMS on 386 systems. There is about 617k conventional free
memory with this install on a 386.
The CD is self-bootable on most systems. It follows El Torito boot
standards and uses floppy emulation. The floppy image is included for
systems that just won't boot off the disc. For example: I once got a
SCSI card in a 286 to boot, but the vast majority won't.
This CD was primarily devloped for and with the 86Box emulator. Support
for other hardware is not included; but can be hacked on if you know
what you're doing.
For further information and instructions, consult the READ.ME.
Downloads:
ISO & Floppy Image: (7z) (zip) (tar.gz)
ISO Image Only: (ISO)
Boot Floppy: (img)
Demo Video:
READ.ME:
MS DOS 6.22 Install CD
dewdude - 21-AUG-2024
dosdude@this-is-a-wendys.com
This CD will install MS DOS 6.22. Seriously.
It's also bootable. I know right?
But seriously, bootable disc will install a MS-DOS 6.22 system with CD-ROM
drivers. Memory and driver customizations are on you.
This was developed, tested, and primarily built for 86Box. As a result, it's hardware
support is somewhat tied to it. For example, here is a list of valid SCSI cards that
this disc supports:
This is literally every SCSI adapter in 86Box, with the exception
of the NCR 53c820; that won't work under any DOS configuration I tried.
It also supports basically every IDE controller 86Box can throw at it.
Using This Disc:
This expects a hard drive at C after the disk initalization. If you
have more drives, that's fine. It's installing to C.
Stick the CD in a drive you can boot from. Boot the disc. The on-screen
prompts are minimal. While the 386 prompt at the start will determine if
you skip a number of CD-ROM drivers, it's also used for EMM386 install
status.
This system supports multiple CD-ROM drives, though it will install from
the first drive it finds the disc in. If an IDE CD-ROM drive is found, it
will ask if you want to skip scanning SCSI drivers. If you don't have any
SCSI cards, this is fine. If you booted off a SCSI CD-ROM and just happen
to have an IDE drive, you'll need to scan for SCSI.
Thanks to the use of FINDCD.EXE; I no longer have to ask you anything about
your CD-drives during boot. Got 8 of them? No problem.
If your system absolutely cannot boot off a CD because you can't get the
SCSI card's BIOS routines to work or you're on physical hardware and can't
just swap a new one in; then a boot floppy image is provided. It is the
same boot routine used to master the El Torito boot.
While CD-Drivers are loaded post-boot using devload.com; final install will
place entries in config.sys and autoexec.bat like normal.
Notes:
SCSI hardware (even in 86Box) is tricky. Some of these cards just didn't work
on some system configurations.
I found it really funny the ASPILS_D.SYS driver, from Corel, for the Corel
LS2000 card....would not work with the LS2000 in 86Box.
This entire thing started out as a joke before I found out just how bad the
actual DOS 6.22 setup program was. It actually got kicked off with a disk i
made that contained enough stuff to fdisk, format, and xcopy.
This entire thing is written in batch. Yes, batch; with help from choice;
and some other things.
Rather than just blindly loading drivers in config.sys and hoping one sticks,
it's done in a batch script using devload. This avoids extra time during the
post fdisk reboot. It was also a necessity for installing CD-ROM drivers. The
script stops when it finds a working driver and writes it to an env variable.
Then all I have to do later is just call %sdrv% and out pops a file name.
The original driver test disk consisted of about 32 possible ASPI managers.
All of the aspi4dos.sys devices can also be run by aspidrv.sys.
FINDCD.EXE is in fact the same one used on the Win98/NT51 boot disks. It's
been patched to look for a file of my choosing. This was literally easier
than trying to do it any other way.
DOS sucks. There's inconsistencies with errorlevels and virtually nothing to
give you real system information.
Yes devload.com is from FreeDOS. No, I don't think FreeDOS is evil; I'm not
in that game. I'm just here to do pointless stuff. But I will say I can get
MS-DOS to do a CD-ROM on an 8088; FreeDOS can't. I'm also not 100% sure if
devload was always part of freedos. I don't think it was.
The cd-rom search loads drivers in this order:
(everybody)
videcdd
(386 and higher)
aspi8xx
btdosm
amsida
(everybody else)
aspi4dos
RT1000
aspidrv
ma128
MA13B
Everyone will attempt to load the ide driver first.
If you said you had a 386 or higher, you will start at aspi8xx; these three drivers are
PCI era and crash a 286.
The rest of the cards are from the ISA(16) era and run fine on XT/AT.
Changelog:
13-AUG-2024: Initial Script - Horrible CDROM Support
15-AUG-2024: Better CD-ROM script
16-AUG-2024: CD-ROM script now remembers driver loaded. Merge 286/386 installs with prompt. Is now more scripts calling scripts.
17-AUG-2024: Put CD-ROM script after disk init to save some time. Still a hackjob but a fancier one.
19-AUG-2024: Resort to patched FINDCD.EXE since other methods fail. Loads all CD drives and finds disc automatically.
20-AUG-2024: Couple of ISO builds - minor tweaks to files due to filename mangling in build.
22-AUG-2024: First release.
dewdude's MS-DOS 6.22 Install CD