AkBKukU / dos-floppy-installs

Simple DOS Software Floppy Install

Simple DOS Software Floppy Install

This is a guide on a very simplistic set of methods for creating installation disks for copying files to a DOS system. This does not use any traditional installation methods and instead uses either bare files or a ZIP to hold the contents to be installed. This does cover modifying PATH, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and CONFIG.SYS for the system to use the new software.

Why?

Getting raw files into a VM or onto real hardware is annoying. It's trivial to build a disk image using WinImage or mtools but then getting the files into the right place on an DOS system is a chore. This aims to make it easy to throw together a quick script to "install" files for custom disk images to make it easier to build your own disks with your preferred programs ready to go.

File Transfers

There are two ways here that you could retrieve files from a disk. My preference is to use direct when possible because it allows files to be run from the disk still despite being more complicated.

Direct

REM Copy files
XCOPY /E *.* %INSTALL_DIR%\

REM Clean copied files
del %INSTALL_DIR%\INSTALL.BAT
del %INSTALL_DIR%\SED.COM
del %INSTALL_DIR%\UNZIP.EXE
del %INSTALL_DIR%\INFOZIP.LIC

This copies all files from the disk and then removes unneeded files copied because there is no exclude available on MS-DOS 6.22.

UnZip

REM Decompress Files
UNZIP %SOURCE_ZIP% -d %INSTALL_DIR%\

This unzips files using Info-ZIP to the destination directory.

Examples

Three examples of different kinds of installations are provided to cover different software types.

PATH Programs

Full Install BAT File

@ECHO OFF

SET INSTALL_DIR=C:\BIN\VIM
SET INSTALL_SED=C:\\BIN\\VIM

echo Installing Vim to %INSTALL_DIR%

REM Make install directory
IF NOT EXIST %INSTALL_DIR%\NUL MKDIR /S %INSTALL_DIR%

REM Copy files
XCOPY /E *.* %INSTALL_DIR%\

REM Clean copied files
del %INSTALL_DIR%\INSTALL.BAT
del %INSTALL_DIR%\SED.COM

REM Add to PATH
find /c /I "%INSTALL_DIR%" C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT >NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL%==1 (
    IF EXIST C:\AUTOEXEC.IST DEL C:\AUTOEXEC.IST
    REN C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT C:\AUTOEXEC.IST
    SED "s/^PATH.*/$0;%INSTALL_SED%/" C:\AUTOEXEC.IST > C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT
)

This is an example of installing a subset of files for Vim 5.0 for MS-DOS I would copy vim.exe and xxd.exe to the disk and nothing else. This would give you a minimal installation with hex functionality. But you could more more files like help documents on the disk as well with this.

In order to modify the PATH environment variable a copy of SED MS-DOS is used. This allows us to find and modify the PATH line in AUTOEXEC.BAT, however it does now allow writing back to the same file. So a backup file is used making it a two step process. Before any of that though, FIND is used to determine if the destination directory is already likely in the PATH. This check is imperfect however and may have false positives.

Also note that a second variable, INSTALL_SED, is created with escaped back slashes for use with SED. There is no string substitute functionality in base MS-DOS 6.22 so you must fix this manually or use a tool or shell like 4DOS which can add this. The included method is the most compatible but is annoying to have to do.

AUTOEXEC.BAT Launched Programs

Full Install BAT File

@ECHO OFF

SET INSTALL_DIR=C:\BIN

SET AUTOEXEC_SYS=C:\BIN\CTMOUSE.EXE

echo Installing Cute Mouse to %INSTALL_DIR%

REM Make install directory
IF NOT EXIST %INSTALL_DIR%\NUL MKDIR /S %INSTALL_DIR%

REM Copy file
xcopy ctmouse.exe C:\BIN

REM Add to AUTOEXEC.BAT
find /c /I "%AUTOEXEC_SYS%" C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT >NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL%==1 echo %AUTOEXEC_SYS% >> C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT

This is an example of installing Cute Mouse which only needs a single EXE file to be run from AUTOEXEC.BAT to work. The main thing to note is that you could replace the variable for what write to AUTOEXEC.BAT with multiple hard coded lines instead if you were adding something more complext. And that this can only postpend to the end of the file. If you are using MENUs or have something else that must be run after, you will need to move the line to the appropriate location.

CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT Software

Full Install BAT File

@ECHO OFF

SET INSTALL_DIR=C:\BIN\DEST

SET CONFIG_SYS=DEVICE=%INSTALL_DIR%\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:OAKCD
SET AUTOEXEC_SYS=C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:OAKCD

echo Installing Oak CD-DROM Driver to %INSTALL_DIR%

REM Make install directory
IF NOT EXIST %INSTALL_DIR%\NUL MKDIR /S %INSTALL_DIR%

REM Copy files
XCOPY /E OAKCDROM.SYS %INSTALL_DIR%\

REM Add to CONFIG.SYS
find /c /I "%CONFIG_SYS%" C:\CONFIG.SYS >NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL%==1 echo %CONFIG_SYS% >> C:\CONFIG.SYS

REM Add to AUTOEXEC.BAT
find /c /I "%AUTOEXEC_SYS%" C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT >NUL
if %ERRORLEVEL%==1 echo %AUTOEXEC_SYS% >> C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT

This example installs the CD-ROM driver available on the Windows 98 Startup disk to an MS-DOS system. This is mostly the same as the AUTOEXEC.BAT Launched Programs script but includes an additional block for the CONFIG.SYS file.