pxe boot dos 7.x / 8.x on modern mainboard without floppy controller
- by GitaarLAB
How to pxe boot MS DOS 7.x / 8.x on a modern pc (mainboard without floppy controller) without using an external usb floppy drive?
MS DOS 6.22 and earlier or other flavors pxe boot just fine on floppy-less hardware.
But DOS 7.x and 8.x renders an error on boot: "Type the name of the Command Interpreter (e.g., C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM)
I read somewhere during research this was a rather unknown error, that started to become more common due to the advent of floppy-controller-less hardware.
On some hardware (bios dependent) one could plug a usb-floppy-drive in the computer before booting (but that MIGHT also require it to be a "golden floppy drive" (as they where called back then).
From a russian site (I read about a year ago and cannot find the hyperlink) MS-Dos versions 6.22 did some-kind of floppy-drive reset during initialization and since it couldn't connect to the floppy-host thus the error.
How can I resolve this (without a physical external usb floppy)?
Might there be some kind of virtual floppy-driver that could resolve this (for example to be loaded before the dos image loads)?
Or could someone point me into the right direction (maybe even a hex-address and some further explanation or something)?
I'm using syslinux by the way.
