Saturday, December 30, 2017

Add MS-DOS boot option to Windows 2000

I've got an old laptop that is running Windows 2000 & Windows 98 in a multi-boot configuration. I need to add MS-DOS to that list of startup options.




I've already added a primary partition, formatted it for FAT16 and made it bootable, and installed MS-DOS 6.22.



My question is, how do I add my MS-DOS partition to the list of startup options?



More information:



My single hard drive has three primary partitions:




  • 0: FAT32 Windows 2000


  • 1: FAT32 Windows 98

  • 2: FAT(16) MS-DOS 6.22



Currently, the boot-up screen lists Windows 2000 and Windows 98 as options, with Windows 2000 as the default choice.



My boot.ini file currently looks like this:



[Boot Loader]
Timeout=30

Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"


I've tried adding the following line to the end of the boot.ini file, from an answer below:



multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT" C:\="MS-DOS"



However, it doesn't work. The third menu choice is listed as "Windows NT", and when selected, I get the following error:



Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.


I've tried the following line:




multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\Windows="MSDOS 6.22"


That gives me the same "ntoskrnl.exe" error as shown above.



I've also tried this line in boot.ini:



C:\="Microsoft DOS"



All this does, when selected, is start my Windows 98 installation.



I'm currently using a boot CD to boot to MSDOS, but I would rather boot from the hard disk.

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