Ms-Dos on xp
 

Is there anyway to run ms-dos on xp or would that just cause problems??:confused:

very simple and safe solution would be Vitrual PC. other then that I'm not sure...

well, xp does have the command prompt that resembles dos.

sounds to me like he needs real DOS (well MSDOS). muckluck what are you planning on doing?

Even in he did manage to get DOS on there, he'd have to have another filesystem for it. Chances are he's using NTFS...

You could use System Commander to run MSDOS and XP togeather, i've done it before with Windows 2000 and MSDOS, so it should work the same for XP.
The DOS command prompt in XP in NOT the same as being it DOS, just so you know.

i vaguely remember real mode and protected mode. is that the main diff?

The modes are lower memory addressing schemes used in early computer times (386/486) to address the problem introduced in 32 bit computers (introduced in the 386) of addressing memory higher than the basic 640k. It's a legacy thing that doesn't matter much now that windows and linux address memory a little differently and fake the modes for you, and the fact 16bit computer programs hardly exist.

The main difference is dos had access to the raw hardware, and under XP thats not allowed, so it goes through XP to gain access to the hardware via device drivers etc.

You can run most msdos games on XP , especially the later vesa mode ones, XP has a multitude of settings to allow you to simulate a better match for the program you want.

If you have a Win 98 boot disk, just use that and see if what you need is in there. if it comes to it, try and partition your drive and install win 98 on it.

Hmm this may be a longshot, but you can give VDMSound a try: http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/

It doesn't just do sound. It has some rudimentary hardware emulation for CDROM, VESA modes, joysticks, etc. And of course it takes care of the memory management issues. Only problem is that it can be quite sluggish and sometimes unstable, in certain games.

well, these are all good ways to run DOS, but what is it that you are actually trying to do with DOS? perhaps there is a workaround or something

Well, you could boot to a DOS partition by modifying the NT boot loader, but then you can't run XP at the same time.

I'm not sure if FreeDOS would help any. I don't use it, but maybe they have a way of running it in XP. Seeing as FreeDOS is 100% compatible with DOS, you should see if they can help. http://www.freedos.org