There's no such thing as adding DOS memory. If you have
more than a megabyte, DOS has all it can use (native
DOS Aps can do more, but that's another story).
What you have to do is free it by removing DOS apps that
use it, and/or loading DOS into the so-called upper
memory area (between 684k and 1 mb).
Are you booting to a DOS prompt or are you just trying
to run from a DOS box after booting Win 98? If the latter,
don't. Reboot (from your Win 98 drive), and press F8
as soon as you get through the startup sequence, then
select Command Prompt Only from the list of choices.
The F8 timing is a little tricky; you want to do it just as
it says "Starting Windows 98" (or I guess that's it,
it's "Starting Windows 95" for Win95).
Another way should be to boot Win98, choose ShutDown
from the start menu, then choose "Reboot to command prompt"
or some such wording. This should work ok, but I don't
know exactly how the boot disk bios selection comes into
play. I'd guess it only gets changed with a hard reset
(or actually changing it in the BIOS setup maybe?).
If this doesn't work, make a bootable Win98 floppy with
minimal CD-ROM access. You should always have one of these
available. We've talked about it here
several times, but it's probably time I posted the contents
of my boot disk again, so here it is:
95BootFloppy
07/11/95 09:50a 15,252 ATTRIB.EXE
09/02/98 11:23a 90 AUTOEXEC.BAT
01/16/99 02:02p <DIR> CDs
07/11/95 09:50a 27,248 CHKDSK.EXE
07/11/95 09:50a 92,870 COMMAND.COM
01/16/99 02:00p 132 CONFIG.SYS
07/11/95 09:50a 20,522 DEBUG.EXE
02/29/96 11:00p 32,396 DISKSAVE.EXE
02/29/96 11:00p 3,766 DISKSAVE.TXT
07/11/95 09:50a 71,287 DRVSPACE.BIN
11/06/96 11:15a 0 EBD.SYS
07/11/95 09:50a 69,886 EDIT.COM
07/11/95 09:50a 59,128 FDISK.EXE
07/11/95 09:50a 40,135 FORMAT.COM
07/11/95 09:50a 223,148 IO.SYS
07/11/95 09:50a 25,473 MSCDEX.EXE
11/06/96 11:15a 9 MSDOS.SYS
03/04/97 07:40p 46,393 NTFSDOS.EXE
09/10/96 09:50p 8,812 NTFSHLP.VXD
02/06/97 11:16p 13,261 NTFSRDME.TXT
07/11/95 09:50a 120,320 REGEDIT.EXE
11/06/96 11:01a 134,738 SCANDISK.EXE
07/11/95 09:50a 7,270 SCANDISK.INI
07/11/95 09:50a 13,239 SYS.COM
07/11/95 09:50a 76,496 UNINSTAL.EXE
27 File(s) 1,101,871 bytes
95BootFloppy\cds
08/10/95 10:16a 33,110 ACERCD.SYS
11/19/96 02:40a 31,824 LTNIDE.SYS
04/15/97 02:47p 28,913 SBIDE.SYS
09/06/96 01:19a 27,290 Sbide0.sys
02/06/96 03:21p 23,776 XXidecd.sys
7 File(s) 144,913 bytes
The CDs directory contains drivers for the various
CD flavors I have around on my old ju ... uh, equipment.
I don't remember what all of this stuff is <g>,
nor do I know about the ebd.sys file of zero length.
But this shows the kind of stuff I keep around for
booting. Looking at it I realize I should also have
Expand.com (or .exe -- I forget).
Anyhow, the boot files are below. At the moment they are set up
to run the LTNIDE cdrom driver. (Aside: SBIDE.SYS is useful;
this is the sound blaster IDE cd-rom driver which will
run a heck of a lot of CDRoms because Creative has had
so many suppliers for the CDs in its multimedia kit.
You can download it from the soundblaster web site.)
The semicolons are supposed to comment things out.
They never seem to work but don't hurt anything because
they either work or cause the line to be invalid and
ignored <g>. Same for Rem.
config.sys:
DEVICE=a:\CDs\ltnide.sys /D:MSCD0001
; Note: /P:addr,irq. 1E8,11; 170,15, etc
; DEVICE=a:\cds\sbide.sys /D:MSCD0002 /P:170,15 /V
autoexec.bat
;rem -- /L:<driveletter> switch to assign MSCDEX drive letter
MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD0001 /V |
