>There are some who dislike Microsoft so much that they may be missing
>advantages of the MS-DOS 7 that comes with WIN98. I am trying to switch
>from DOS 6.22 to DOS 7, have not tested everything yet, but so far am
>impressed:
>
>1) DOS7 supports FAT32 partitions. I don't believe that the non-MS DOS's
>do that, and certainly not DOS 6X.
>
>2) DOS7 has native support for LS-120 so drive A can be a multi-megabyte,
>bootable emergency recovery disk with every utility you would ever need.
>perhaps WIN3 or even a cut down version of WIN98 would run from the LS-120.
>To be bootable, BIOS has to support booting from LS.
>
>3) I haven't tried it yet but it appears that if the BIOS supports
>booting from CD-ROM, then DOS 7 on the CD will boot. That's a 650 MB
>CD boot disk. Do any of the non-MS DOS's support LS or CD booting?
>
>4) A previous message from someone said that DOS 7 did not recognize a
>5.25" disk in drive B. I tried that on my old PC and it worked fine.
>
>So, does anyone have or know of test results to show that DOS 7 won't work
>as well as DOS 6 (speed, memory usage, etc) or is not compatible with
>programs that DOS 6 runs?
>
>Thanks, Barry.
Most people are not aware of the advantages of MS-DOS 7 over 6.22. MS stresses
Windows, not the DOS underpart. With DR-DOS 7.03, I can't use FAT32. Most
Windows-haters go with Linux, lesser numbers go with OS/2 Warp or eComStation,
(Free, Net, Open)BSD, BeOS or MacOS. Linux users have no need to care about the
advantages of MS-DOS 7 over 6.22, same applies with BSD, etc. Most Linux
wouldn't have enough DOS stuff to qualify for FAT32.
MS-DOS 5, 6.22 and the Win98SE emergency boot diskette all failed to read my DOS
(FAT16) partition on the second hard disk. OS/2 Warp 4, Linux, and DR-DOS 7.03
had no trouble. FreeDOS also read this partition. MS-DOS 5, 6.22, DR-DOS 7.03
and OS/2 Warp 4 had no trouble with drive B (5.25"), while Win98SE emergency
boot disk grossly misread a 5.25" diskette, one that Linux equally misread.
Linux was able to read other DOS-formatted 5.25" diskettes, the problem diskette
had 110 (?) root directory entries, compared to the allowable maximum of 224 for
high density. Now I see (in OS/2 Warp 4) that I can't read 5.25" high-density
or low-density diskettes, think this must be a hardware problem, not worth
repairing on this outdated computer. If I want to save dBASE IV 1.5 and MASM 6,
which came on 5.25" high-density diskettes, I'll have to XCOPY or Infozip via
Zip 250.
I thought DOS depended on BIOS for LS-120, thus DOS could read/write LS-120 is
the BIOS is up to it. You could put a lot of DOS Internet stuff on LS-120, and
XCOPY Arachne to RAMDRIVE or VDISK, and access the Internet even if the hard
drive crashes. 1.44 MB diskette + Zip 250 might also work. So I would assume
DR-DOS 7.03 would boot from LS-120 given appropriate BIOS. Not sure about
booting from CD, that would depend on the BIOS.
