Windows 7 and FreeDOS dual boot

C

c_bauer

Member
Hi !

How would I go about installing and booting FreeDOS when Windows 7 is already on the machine ?

Background: Since I don't want to shred Win7's bootloader, I followed this advice
and moved the Win7 Partition up 256 MiB, used GParted on a Live CD to format the first partition
with FAT32 and then installed FreeDOS from CD-ROM. That worked OK.

At the end of the FreeDOS installation, IIRC, I chose to write the boot sector of that partition.

Win7 still comes up normally, and I used EasyBCD to manage the BCD store of Windows to add FreeDOS
to the boot menu of the Windows Boot Manager.

Under EasyBCD, I used "Add new Entry", Type "MS-DOS 6.x" and since it says that it would automatically
determine the drive i thought this would do the trick.

When the machine starts up, the Windows boot Manager does Show a new entry "FreeDOS" (that's how I named it in EasyBCD), but when I hit enter, I only see a GRUB console that waits for user input ...

To sum it up: how can I add FreeDOS to the Win7 boot Manager ?

regards,
Chris
 
Last edited:
Looks promising.Before I try that out, I'd like to know if that specific configuration has been tested by anybody or is DOS just too old to play well with Windows 7 ?best,Chris
 
That specific configuration was tried by one of our customers, who then requested why mainstream it into EasyBCD.
I personally would use a virtual machine for this, but that's just me.
 
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