# Triple boot DOS and install from usb.



## Mike775 (Nov 24, 2015)

Hello,

I am seeking some help on a triple boot. I would like to boot DOS, 98 and XP. My HDD has 3 primary partitions. I am trying to install dos to the fire partition.

I cannot figure out how to install dos from a usb drive. I cannot seem to get the file right. I am using RUFUS USB.

Can someone please help pointing me to the right procedures and files for dos, I have 98 and XP.

I have looked everywhere to find a way as my lappy does not have a floppy or cd drive.

Thank you very much in advance,

Mike


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## foxidrive (Oct 20, 2012)

Mike775 said:


> RUFUS USB.


Tell us where this package is from - and what you have tried, and how it failed.

It's useful to say what you've been able to do and where it failed.


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## managed (May 24, 2003)

Windows 98 has some Dos stuff built-in, do you really need a separate Dos installed ?


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## Courtneyc (Dec 7, 2003)

Have you thought about virtual machines (such as VMware Workstation, which is free)? I currently have DOS 6.22, Windows 98, Ubuntu Desktop, and Windows 10 on virtual machines (under Windows 10 Pro).

Remember that a Windows XP machine cannot run DOS. Too much memory. That's why I went the virtual machine route.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

> Remember that a Windows XP machine cannot run DOS. Too much memory. That's why I went the virtual machine route.


It can with the correct config and run settings. I run DOS on my machines with 2Gb memory.


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## saikee (Jun 11, 2004)

I believe MS systems were written to regard a USB drive having only one partition and does not recognise the 2nd, 3rd.... if they exist. As such it is a dead end to do triple boot with a USB drive.

On a normal hard disk the problem does not exist. However all three systems of Dos, Win95 and Xp can only boot from an active partition although Xp can be booted from a non-active partition or even in a logical partition it needs a boot manager from Vista or Win7 to fire it up.

To triple boot the above three systems, install them in a normal hard disk and use a boot loader called Grub from Linux. It can do it on-the-fly to make one primary partition active, de-active the other one, hide partitions and fire up whatever operating system you can install in the PC.

For example if you install Dos, Win95 and Xp in Partition 1, 2 and 3. Xp can boot up if (i) Partition 1 & 2 are hidden and (ii) Partition (3) is active. This is because the boot loaders of these three systems search all 4 primary partitions and boot up the one that has been marked active.

The boot loader of each of the three is embedded in the boot sector of its own primary partition. The MBR is occupied by Grub which serves as the first point of contact. It then hands over the control to any of the three systems selected by you from a menu.

The modern way to do this has been already pointed out by using virtual machines. In triple boot you can run only one OS at a time but it will be the fastest you can get. With virtual machines you can access to all of them but at slow speeds.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

That is wrong for so many reasons.
Firstly Microsoft had NOTHING to do with the basic boot process - or didn't until the UEFI fiasco.
Second the boot process always boots to the first active bootable partition on the first available drive in the sequence specified in the BIOS. Now it just so happens that that may be a tiny program call a boot loader that may redirect it elsewhere. ( again until UEFI)


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## saikee (Jun 11, 2004)

There is nothing right or wrong about the public information. I refer to commands like SYS in Dos, boot.ini in Xp, bootrec.exe, bootsec.exe and BCDedit.exe in Vista and later Windows which are all commands and programs MS allows a user to configure the basic boot process. The booting process of searching from the 4 primary partitions within the MBR, each only 16 bytes long, the first byte to see if it is set to 0 (not bootable) or 0x80 (bootable or active), and search disks in the sequential order recorded by the Bios is just "a" method used by MS and other OSes like some BSD. 

Linux and Unix systems never need use the active partition at all because its boot loaders can be instructed by a user to select from any partition, including logical partitions, from any disk.

The way the earlier MS systems boots up the operating system is well documented so that many boot loaders have been written to dual boot.

A boot loader can also alter from the 16-byte partition table the 4th byte which identifies the filing system when the partition is formatted. MS systems use ID 6 and c (for LBA) for the Fat16 and Fat32. By adding the digit "1" in front, changing the ID to 16 and 1c, can cause the MS systems ignore their existences. This effectively causes these partitions to be hidden as the MS systems do not support them and refuse to mount them. The trick is as old as DOS itself and used by virtually all non-MS boot loaders. The disk order is just a temporary record from the BIOS upon powering up the PC. This can be also temporary changed by the boot loader which restores the original setting upon the exit of the booted up system. These temporary changes to the MSDOS partition table and the BIOS settings may look alarming to MS systems users because they are discouraged from interfering with them. However they can be just simple and standard operations for non-MS operating systems available in the manuals of non-MS boot loaders.
Therefore just because MS does not want us to do it doesn't make the process wrong. Although MS did not have multiboot in mind for the three OSes specified by the Thread Starter later MS Windows do include multibooting with non-MS systems. Therefore MS not only has something to do with the boot process but also provide us facilities/programs to do it.


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## DaveBurnett (Nov 11, 2002)

You missed a very powerful utility called SYMON that has been around for many years that handles multiple partitions on a disk.


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## saikee (Jun 11, 2004)

Don't think I miss much SyMon that claim to be able to create up to 36 partitions on one single hard drive and up to 20 operating systems can be organized on their partitions. This thread shows the way I cloned a Xp to 126 partitions in one hard disk and was able to boot any one of them using just Legacy Grub.

I favoured Legacy Grub that can do over +100 partitions and OSes on a single disk even before GPT partition table was invented. Current Grub2 can do the full 128 partitions on one GPT disk. I use Linux because it is open source and the inner working is not kept as secrets. That way one can understand the operating system better and does not need to rely on external utilities.

Booting may be a propriety secret in MS systems but it is dead easy in Linux. I was booting 100+ systems 1.5 years after starting to learn Linux using Legacy Grub to boot 
3 Dos
3 Windows
5 BSDs 
2 Solaris 
97 Linux including 2 versions of NetBSD


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