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Creating a bootable DOS HDD without a boot device

I've come across this problem twice now. Both times it has been with older 'subnotebooks' which have no internal removable media and don't have the ability to boot from external drives. You also may just not have the ability to create a bootable floppy disk.

The problem also occurs when you have a harddisk, a USB to IDE converter and you want to make a bootable DOS partition on it. This can be done with USB keys, but HDDs, when attached to the USB bus, appear differently and most tools wont want to work with larger drives.

Using a virtual solution

Most emulators allow 'direct disk' access to physical drives attached to your PC. This can be a godsend, or can be seriously dangerous! I've tried a few now, and I'm a total fan of VMWare. Both DOSBOX and Virtual Box failed me.

DOSBOX got very close... I created a partition using diskpart in Windows 10 and then mounted the new drive as c in DOSBOX. I then mounted a DOS 6.22 disk image and tried to run the fdisk/sys/format commands, which all reported Incorrect DOS version. Booting DOSBOX with the floppy image resulted in not being able to access the HDD at all.

Virtual Box, with a lot of trickery, allowed direct physical access to the HDD. Unfortunately, the format and fdisk commands failed miserably with out of space (or other random) errors.

Preparing your disk with VMWare

Find a suitable version of VMWare Workstation and create a new virtual machine. It doesn't need to be high spec; give it 64mb RAM and no storage. Attach a floppy image (grab one from AllBootDisks). Next, go to Disk Management in Windows and work out your drive number. You can see below that I want drive number 3.

Once you've got this, you can configure a new storage device in your new virtual machine.

If you chose Entire Disk then you'll be able to do the whole lot, regardless of the drive state, with VMWare. Otherwise, choosing Individual Partition will mean that you'll need to partition the drive somewhere else first.

Once you're booted, you should be at a DOS prompt with all the tools you'll need. Run fdisk first and create your partitions. Make sure you set one to active!

Reboot the machine at this point, just to make sure all settings stick. Once back in, run fdisk /mbr for good measure. This will properly re-create the MS-DOS Master Boot Record that'll allow your BIOS to find your active boot partition.

Now that you've got a valid partition, run a format c:/s to format C as FAT and transfer system files to make it entirely bootable. Give the partition a label when it asks.

Copy Windows Setup Files

Grab a copy of your favourite windows from WinWorld. This particular laptop was 'built for Millenium'... hah... so I retrieved that ISO. I loved the screenshots!

The best thing to do at this point (and the whole reason why we're here) is to copy over an entire Windows setup folder to the disk. This means that setup will be really quick and, down the track, you'll always have setup files handy. Remember how many times WFW311 used to ask for the network disk? Even if you were just changing IP configuration?

Note that the copying of the Windows Setup folder can be done outside of an emulator. The proviso here is that your host can read the format of the newly partitioned drive. Once copied, cleanly unmount the disk and get it back into the target machine.

If you get to a DOS Prompt, then you should only have to change to the windows setup folder and then run setup.exe.