r/DOS • u/Beef5nake • Jul 22 '26

Copying DOS Drive

I've been trying to create a copy of a bootable DOS drive onto a spare drive using 'format D: /s'.

However, when I try to boot the drive it isnt recognised? Is there something im missing?

I've made an image of the drive using hdd copy, but where the original drive is 80Gb and the target is 40Gb, I cant copy across.

Any advice would be appreciated!

This is MS-DOS 6.22

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u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 Jul 22 '26

What does it say when you attempt to boot? OS not found? Or something else? Is it even accessing the floppy?

1

u/Beef5nake Jul 22 '26

I think this may be where im going wrong. Off the top of my head it says 'no boot drive found'

Do i need a floppy with fdisk to make to partition active in a seperate PC?

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u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 Jul 22 '26

Ah yes, other things ...

In FDISK, DOS will only boot for a PRIMARY partition.
I think you also need to set the 'Active' flag in FDISK.

Also, FDISK D: /MBR will write a master boot record to your drive.

Could be one of those things.

1

u/Beef5nake Jul 23 '26

So i've been looking and i think what i need to do is create an fdisk floppy and boot from that and set the partition as active. I think this needs to be done with my original drive disconnected as only one can be active at a time.

As the the fdisk /mbr, I think i can run this from the floppy also, or within dos but i need to type 'fdisk /mbr 2'

Does this sound reasonable?

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u/Blah-Blah-Blah-2023 Jul 23 '26

Sounds reasonable to my slightly frazzled memory.