I recently bought a DOS based game (Privateer2) and am having trouble running it on my computer which has Win 95 installed. I created a Startup disk using AddRemove Programs on the Control Panel, but it didn’t have an Autoexec.Bat and only 1 line on the Config.Sys (DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS) I created an Autoexec.Bat from Privateer but when I reboot to DOS I cannot access the CD-Rom which is on E. I have 2 questions - why can’t I access the E: drive and is there an easy way using Win 95 to include all the lines for the CD-ROM, soundcard and mouse on the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys? Thanks.

In response to your first question, the reason why you cannot access your CD-ROM drive from DOS is because your CD drivers don’t load during boot-up from your disk (neither the drivers nor the lines to load them are contained on the boot disk or within the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files). There are three possible ways to get your game to run. The first way is to simply run your game in a DOS box during a Windows session. This would work because your CD drivers are already loaded by Windows at this stage. To do this, just view the contents your CD and run the application like you would any Windows application or you can open the ‘MS-DOS Prompt’ shortcut in the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Programs’ group. A possible problem is that some DOS programs don’t like being run within a DOS box and/or won’t run. You could get around this by using a setting that hides the DOS box operation; however, I don’t recommend this because there is probably a good reason why the program shouldn’t be run though a DOS box. The second possible solution would be to shutdown your computer to MS-DOS mode. You do this by going to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Shutdown’ > ‘Restart in MS-DOS mode’. This will shutdown the Windows GUI and give you an MS-DOS prompt. The advantage of this is that because the Windows GUI isn’t running, other Windows background programs and operations aren’t running which maximises your available RAM. Another advantage of this approach is that all of your sound and CD drivers are still resident in memory because when you booted Windows, the drivers were loaded. I personally think that this is the best way to run a DOS based application. The third way to do it relates to your second question. In short, there is no way to easily and automatically create a boot disk that contains all of your CD drivers, etc. However, you can get a DOS session to run your game if you manually create a boot disk. This is a bit tedious which is why I left it to last. To do this, you would have to copy your existing autoexec.bat and config.sys files to the boot disk, editing the files to eradicate redundant lines which don’t apply to your boot disk, then manually copy each CD driver file and sound driver file to the disk. Although, the other two suggestions are usually reliable and quick ways to accomplish the goal, if they don’t work please feel free to contact me again and I will be more than happy to guide you through the process of manually creating a boot disk. Also, if any other readers know of any procedures or applications which can automate the making of boot disks please contact me so I can pass the information on to Steve.