Someone have this working? Please tell what you did, including what bcdedit displays! Especially, which type did you copy the entry from ({ntldr}, {legacy}, something else)? I have tried so much, no success. My DOS is partition 1, Vista 64 is partition 3. I can boot separately to DOS, if make it active, but do not know how to make a correct bcdedit entry (have tried very many combinations).
No way There´s no way to make a dual-boot for DOS and VISTA. Dos boots only from a FAT-partition - Vista don´t like to boot from FAT. If your first patition is FAT and second is NTFS you can install Vista but it doesn´t work because Vista put it´s startup files to the FAT-partition.
Not that this answers your question per se, but why not: 1. install DOS to a flash drive and boot it from that 2. use dosbox 3. use a virtual machine?
I like real DOS, at least it lets me edit boot sectors etc without trouble And in Dell machines one can always boot to the Dell Diagnostics partition, which in reality is a FAT16 DOS partition (you can make it Windows readable by changing the partition type from DE to 06), even if it is not set active. So it is a very good hope of last resort. Just today ran into the fact that I couldn't resize a partition entry using any of general Linux tools gpedit, fdisk, cfdisk, sfdisk... but take out good old DOS and PTEDIT and we're done! Many utilities try to be too smart and thus fail, if I want to change a byte somewhere I really don't need a second opinion to that.
I guess you can add a bootsector entry to boot menu either using bcdedit (use embedded help to find out how), or even more simply via boot.ini like in XP (yes bootmgr DOES read boot.ini and loads bootsector entries from it.)
Bootmgr reads boot.ini? Well that was news! Thanks! Yes I have experimented with many kinds of bcd entries but unfortunately none has been successful
have you tried a 3rd party loader? The problem like the previous poster said lies in the fact that the boot methods are different, and neither boot loader likes the other. You will need to use something 3rd party like grub4dos that will do it. Then use something like NTFS for DOS to read/write the NTFS. Why not just grab a copy of Hiren's boot CD? That has true DOS in it, you might need to edit the ISO to put the tools you want on it...
OK, let's try it with bcdedit: 1. Extract bootsector from DOS partition to file and put this file in the root of your Vista boot partition (there, where bootmgr is located), let's call it btsdos.dat. 2. In Vista run command prompt as admin and type: bcdedit /create /d "Boot DOS partition" /application bootsector It will show {ID} of new record, remember it. Don't close command prompt. 3. Type: bcdedit /displayorder {above id} /addlast (or /addfirst if you wish). 4. Type: bcdedit /set {above id} device partition=C: bcdedit /set {above id} path \btsdos.dat That's all, i think.