Question : Installing MS-DOS 3.20 in Bochs

I'm trying to install MS-DOS 3.20 to a virtual hard disk image in Bochs, the open source PC emulator, just for old time's sake. About 10 years ago I made copies of the original installation disks (which came on 3 5-1/4" 360K floppies) and saved them to a ZIPfile.

This morning I used WinImage to extract the contents of the ZIPfile to three separate disk images and attempted to start the emulator from the first disk image. It didn't work as the MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS files are missing.

After some more digging in my archives, I found a ZIPfile of a very old boot disk I made that does have the MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS files I need. From browsing the other questions on Experts Exchange, I understand that those two files need to be in a very specific location on the floppy disk for it to boot up.

I copied the MSDOS.SYS and IO.SYS files from the boot disk  to the first MS-DOS image file, so all that's left is to somehow have those two system files at their specific location so the emulator can boot from that disk. Any ideas how to do this?

Answer : Installing MS-DOS 3.20 in Bochs

I found a copy of MS-DOS 3.20 here:

http://www.vetusware.com/download/MS%20DOS%203.2/?id=178

The archive contains 3 HDK image files, which I loaded into WinImage to save them as IMA files for use with Bochs. After "inserting" the first floppy disk image and having Bochs boot from that image, I was able to have the emulator run MS-DOS 3.20.

But I still wanted to run my copy of MS-DOS, so I created a blank 360K floppy disk image and put it in virtual drive B in Bochs. Once again I started the emulator to have it boot from the first floppy disk image I was using before. I then "formatted" the blank image in drive B: using the /S option to have the system files transferred. Afterwards I replaced the COMMAND.COM file there with the one from my copy of DOS.

I now have a working copy of the same MS-DOS I had on my very first computer, which had a 286 processor, a 16-color EGA card, 640K of memory and a 30MB hard drive.

Thanks for your help anyway.