Hello everyone,

I just acquired a spare 20GB hard disk and was thinking of putting MS-DOS 6.22 on the first 512 MB and use the rest as a spare partition for Linux/Windows. I'm wondering if there are any DOS experts here who can tell me how I can install it. The things I'm worried about are that a.) The hard disk is over 2 GB, so can DOS recognize it? and b.) Could the installation wipe out my first hard disk or at least wipe out GRUB (when it tries to install the DOS bootloader)?

The procedure I'm planning is this:
1.) Backup my data
2.) Make a GRUB boot disk in case
3.) Install second hard disk
4.) Format hard disk
5.) Create 0.5 GB FAT16 partition, 19.5 GB FAT32 partition.
6.) Install DOS (somehow)
7.) Make sure GRUB still loads
8.) Add DOS to GRUB menu (rootnoverify (hd1,0), chainloader +1? )

Anything I should change?

RH9.0 provides you with fdisk to partition the disk as you like it. So, you can do the following:

1. Shutdown the system.
2. Connect the disk.
3. Boot up, Linux would recognize the disk, but not filesystem on the disk.
4. Partition the disk as desired. This will also format the part of the disk which you want on Linux.
5. Select whichever bootloader you want, GRUB or LILO. Set either Linux or DOS as the default.
6. Shutdown the system.
7. Restart with the CDROM of DOS in place.
8. If your system is not configured to try to boot from CDROM first, configure for that, switch off system, and restart.
9. DOS will ask which partition to install DOS on. Install.

WARNING: DOS absolutely HAS to be installed on the first partition, else it will not work. M$!

So I have to install a bootloader on the second hard disk too? I already have GRUB installed on the MBR of the first one. If there are two bootloaders, how will the computer know which one to use?

Thanks for the partitioning information, but my main issue is with ensuring that DOS installs on the right partition and that it doesn't wipe out my boot loader.

When creating your dos partition, you may need to use fdisk from a windows
boot disk to ensure fat 16 instead of fat 32.
Before you start, search this site on how to recover your mbr if things get mucked up.
I've seen posts about that here before.

I'm interested in this as I'm getting ready to build a dual boot Mandrake/FreeDos
box for some one.
So please post your results good or bad.