# Dual boot to Dos.



## Deathblow (Oct 7, 2003)

I have a 2 Gig partition formatted for Fat that I use to play some old Dos games on. I am currently using a floppy to boot to Dos 6.22. How would I go about making a dual boot with WinXp so that I could choose the Dos boot without the floppy at system power up?


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## gotrootdude (Feb 19, 2003)

The easiest way since you didn't have dos installed to the 2gig partition before installing XP would be to use a boot manager. xosl is one of the most popular free ones. http://www2.arnes.si/~fkomar/xosl.org/
You'll have to read the instructions on it since I've never used it myself..


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## Deathblow (Oct 7, 2003)

Well, I'm a glutton. Is there a way to do it manually instead of using a program to set it up?


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## Deathblow (Oct 7, 2003)

Let me simplify things. Here's my boot.ini, what would I need to have as the dos line for this to work? It's drive 1, first partition.

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /KERNEL=LOGOOS.EXE
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="(Backup Line) Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\="Dos 6.22"


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## Deathblow (Oct 7, 2003)

Well, I messed around with it for a while, but could never get it to boot just editing the boot.ini. Finally I found Acronis Disk Director Suite, which seems to do the trick. Not as simple as I would like, but still not bad. It replaces the normal boot menu with a GUI one and adds some other tweaking options. You can still default a OS to load after so many seconds, which is good. 

I would still like to figure out how to get Dos to boot with the normal boot menu by editing the boot.ini though if anyone can help with that.


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## Deathblow (Oct 7, 2003)

Anyone?


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## Deathblow (Oct 7, 2003)

What a frikin nightmare. Something got messed up with the acronis, and I could no longer boot to XP, and somewhere in the chaos, I lost 3 of my partitions. The good news is, I was able to re-format and this time installed Dos first, and then XP, so I can use it's built in boot menu. The Bad news is, I'll take me weeks to get things back the way I want them. Oh well, was time for a re-install anyways.


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