Document 1105 BOOTING WITH DR DOS Initials: BPT 10/31/91 GENERAL Keywords: BOOT INSTALL Description: In order to install DR DOS you must make sure that you are booting from a floppy in drive A:. DR DOS will not install from drive B:. DR DOS comes on 3 1/2 inch low density floppies and 5 1/4 inch Hi-density floppies. If you need 5 1/4 inch low-density disks (360K) send in the coupon that comes with your DR DOS. If the boot disk hangs while trying to load, usually it means there is an incompatible or faulty piece of hardware. One of the things it can be is simply an older floppy drive that is out of alignment. Sometimes the situation can be salvaged by formatting a floppy on the boot drive with the old DOS, then doing a diskcopy. The potential problem is that the diskcopy may not be able to read the boot disk either. If you can't make a backup then it may be necessary to get a replacement disk set from Digital Research (in case there is an actual error with the disk, which does sometime happen) or see about getting the drives aligned. ******************************************************** Another problem is where you can make valid Diskcopies but all you get is the message "Loading...". Here the potential problem may be the computer's bios. DR DOS must be able to direct the system to the area where DOS Kernel files are located. Older bioses are not able to perform this function. If your bios dates from around 1987 or earlier you may need an update. ******************************************************** And finally, if you can read the disks but are unable to format a disk or make a diskcopy DR DOS may think you have a different type of floppy than you actually have. Another symptom of this is if you are making a floppy installation and DR DOS asks you for 5 1/4" floppies when you actually have 3 1/2" floppies. If this is an XT type computer (by which we mean it has no CMOS config- uration program) then you can place a DRIVPARM state- ment in your CONFIG.SYS. Refer to the DR DOS manual to see how to use this parameter. DRIVPARM uses no RAM. It merely updates the DR DOS drive tables with the type drive you specify. If your computer does have a CMOS setup program then you need to correct the entries for your floppy drives in CMOS.