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I'm trying to dual boot my Windows 10 which I have currently installed on drive C: with MS-DOS 7.10 which I did not have installed on drive S: labeled "doos".

I went ahead and made S: a FAT32 partition while C: is an NTFS and they are both primary partitions (I also backed up my important files). What steps can I take to make this succeed and not break my PC? I'm really paranoid about something going wrong so I'm asking on this forum. Also I heard that the FAT32 partition with automatically boot and the NTFS will just be ignored, if this is true how do I get an option to boot from either?

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  • There was never a standalone dos 7.1 IIRC - it was part of windows 95. Also... why dos?
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 14:42
  • @JourneymanGeek I love the older operating systems so I chose dos, and If that was apart of windows 95 then which version am I meant to be going for?
    – Yoshirou
    Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 14:48
  • freedos feels like a great idea. And you can run dos off a USB key in many cases. Would that be an option?
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 14:58
  • Sounds great, i'll check it out, No risks sounds better :D
    – Yoshirou
    Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:01
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    If you're worrying about messing things up then run in a virtual machine. That'll be much easier than setting up DOS on a modern machine, esp. on UEFI. Otherwise use DOSBOX. Moreover dual booting with the new bootloader in win 8 and up is frustrating.
    – phuclv
    Commented Dec 26, 2016 at 15:39

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Dos 7.1 was part of windows 9.x. There's pirated versions floating around up till windows me's dos 8.0 but meh. IIRC the last standalone copy of dos was 6.22. You don't really want to run that tho

Freedos is a pretty awesome open source clone of dos that's actively worked on. I do believe you can throw on the livecd version to a USB key with rufus.

On modern systems, you may need to turn off secure boot. Windows 10 typically dosen't like that.

Smart money's on running it on a VM or just run dosbox on windows.

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It can be done with the right combination of BCD stuffing, installing IO.SYS etc at the "right" place and several other delicate details to care with; not to mention that DOS (b. 1981, last version released 1994) is at odds with UEFI, AHCI, USB and a lot of what is running in today's PC. If anything goes wrong however, according to your questions, you'll quite probably be near hopeless. So you'll probably be better advised to use DOS in a virtual machine.

By the way, if I had the need to build something like that, I will build a prototype with a virtual machine before even thinking about repartitionning my disk.

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Dualboot MS-DOS 7.10 and Windows 10? its really simple, get easybcd, add MS-DOS entry to boot menu , copy all MS-DOS files including DOS Prompt (COMMAND.COM) , MSDOS.SYS , IO.sys , LOGO.SYS , CONFIG.SYS ,AUTOEXEC.bat (required only command , msdos.sys and io.sys)

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