Gateway 2000 P5-100: Installing MS-DOS and Drivers

Initially, I'll be installing MS-DOS 6.22 on the largest partition that's allowable. In this case, the MS-DOS file allocation table (FAT) file system can support only 2 GB partitions.

The 2-GB partition limit is imposed by the maximum number of clusters and the largest cluster size supported by the FAT file system. The FAT file system is limited to 65,525 clusters. The size of a cluster must be a power of 2 and less than 65,536 bytes--this results in a maximum cluster size of 32,768 bytes (32K). Multiplying the maximum number of clusters (65,525) by the maximum cluster size (32,768) equals 2 GB. This is commonly known as the FAT16 file system.

My hard drive has a total capacity of 10 GB, but because of the limitations of my computer's BIOS, I'll only be able to utilize 8 GB. This 8GB limit only applies because of a longtime standard BIOS function. In order to access bigger drives, some extensions were added to them (the so-called INT13h-extensions, INT 13h are the functions to access the disk drive via BIOS). Operating systems not aware of these extensions like MS-DOS 6 are still limited to the lower 8 GB even with a new BIOS.

My plan is to use special software to make four primary partitions. Each 2 GB partition will have a different OS.

Installing MS-DOS 6.22

My new hard drive was shipped fresh with 10 GB of unallocated space. Using MS-DOS 6.22 installation disks and by following the prompts, MS-DOS automatically created the maximum 2 GB partition and formatted it. The hard drive is then ready for the system installation.

After a successful installation, DOS SHELL was added along with the other extras supplied on the Supplemental Disk. 

Installing the mouse driver

MS-DOS 6.22 did not come with a mouse driver. Adding one is quite simple, by downloading the Microsoft mouse driver and adding the mouse.com file to the DOS directory. In order to run the driver automatically, we need to add a line to the autoexec.bat file.

I find using the Dos Shell an easier method of moving about DOS. This, of course, is with the aid of a mouse, but at the moment, the driver has not been loaded. To be able to use the mouse, we first have to load the driver. Do this, by going into the DOS directory and entering mouse. Now, the mouse is ready for use in the Dos Shell.

At the Dos Shell GUI, there is a text editor available under MAIN.

Make sure that drive C: is highlighted and not the DOS directory. Double-click on Editor and type autoexec.bat in the required popup window. This will open the file's contents in the editor. Add the line:

LH C:\DOS|MOUSE.COM 

(by mistake, I typed > instead of a period initially, but it still worked).

The LH at the beginning is used to load programs in to high memory to free up your conventional memory. There will be more about this later. 

At this time, it's also good to write one last line, simply dosshell. This will automatically load the shell at boot.

Installing the CD-ROM driver

The last essential driver is the CD-ROM driver. This is one of the more difficult drivers to install, due to different systems and CD-ROM manufacturers. I found what works most of the time is a driver that I found that installs on different systems using doscdrom.exe. 

I did a manual install by adding the file cd1.sys to my DOS directory. I then added these lines to my config.sys file:

DEVICE=C:\DOS\cd1.SYS /D:banana
LASTDRIVE=Z

I added this line to my autoexec.bat file:

MSCDEX.EXE /D:banana /L:R

The last letter in the line denotes the drive letter. After a re-boot, the dosshell appears with an operating mouse and all drives accessible.