Help with DOS booting

[Dexter]

Hello all,

I'm trying to boot into arcadeos from bootup but when I try I'm getting 'NTLDR is missing'. The drive has a primary dos partition and an autoexec.bat and config.sys files also.

Is there an easy way to remedy this guys?? HELP

Dexter

[Mameotron]

Well, I'm no expert, but I do know that NTLDR is the program that selects what parts of the operating system to load up.  NTLDR gets this info from the boot.ini file, but I don't know why you wouldn't have the NTLDR.  If it is missing for some reason I think you might have to do a new install.

FDISK fixes everything!!!

Edit:  I just saw on the Everything Else forum a thread just started up about a DOSbox tutorial.  You might wanna watch that one, too.

[Silver]

NTLDR is short for NT Loader, and is only associated with Windows OS from NT onwards/or dual boot situations.

Assuming you are not trying to dual boot (have 2 different OS's available on the same machine) then you have the incorrect bootcode on your hard drive, presumably left over from when the hard drive was used for running windows...

Dos requires a few more files - config.sys and autoexec.bat are not even required to boot - but they are hidden/system files.

Anyway, the easiest way round this is to get a bootable floppy with DOS on it (google for Dos boot disk, there are lots to download out there). I think a lot of people use DOS "7" or the version of DOS that windows 9x runs over. Then boot your machine from the floppy, and the command you need to run is "sys c:" assuming your harddrive is identified as c:

And yes, fdisk may be needed if there are problems idenitfying the drive. Fdisk can wipe and create partitiions for you, which you will then need to format ("format c:") before running the sys command....

Hope that helps....

[Dexter]

Its not a dual boot, just a standalone dos drive for inside a cocktail cab. So the command 'sys C:' will transfer the files from the flopy to the Hard Drive, yes?

Dexter

[spystyle]

If you like DOS you'll love FreeDOS,

http://www.freedos.org/

Groovy?
Craig

[Thenasty]

Its not a dual boot, just a standalone dos drive for inside a cocktail cab. So the command 'sys C:' will transfer the files from the flopy to the Hard Drive, yes?

Dexter

This won't work if you had an NTFS partition to begin with. You have to remove the NON-DOS Partition and re-create it then format the drive with /s parameter.

[Silver]

Thenasty is correct - but I went by your statement that you had set up a primary dos partition on the drive.

the command will be work - but heres the catch - the sys command must be on the bootable dos floppy, and it is not always present. When yuo look for a floppy to download look for what utils it has - you will probbaly find one with it on.

Or as spystyle says there are other versions of Dos - I have not used freedos but have heard good things...

[Dexter]

Cheers for the assistance guys!

[CthulhuLuke]

pop in your DOS bootdisk and run the little friendly program called Fdisk.  It should pop up a nice UI that will guide you through deleting the old partition and putting a new Logical DOS Partition on the hard drive so you can boot off of dos on this thing.    Also if you create the partition from fdisk, and your floppy for sure has the dos version you want to use, then just do a c:  copy a:\*.*   and your c will be loaded up with a nice dos system.

[Silver]

sounds good, except I think you have to boot from a primary partition - a Logical one (created on an extended partition) may not be bootable.

also the copy a:\*.* option will not alter the bootcode on the partition. This is not a file - its a small peice of code that tells the system which file to look for first. Hence the "NTLDR is missing" problem. copying the files over won't change this. The sys command will both copy the files and rewrite the correct bootcode for DOS.