# Boot to DOS on Intel Macbook



## Westy (Jun 27, 2006)

Is it possible to boot into DOS on a Intel Mac?

I guess it wouldn't like a USB Floppy Drive, but maybe a regular bootdisk copied to a CD and made Bootable?                 

Why I want to know is that there is a possiblity of us getting 20 Macbooks and dual booting, but I'd like to be able to use Norton Ghost to put windows disk images. Unfortunatly I don't yet have an Intel mac to try this on.


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## fryke (Jun 27, 2006)

You could use Mac OS X to handle disk images, maybe, if you use FAT32 as Windows' disk format. I don't think DOS boots on intel Macs. At least I haven't heard of it. Does Norton _really_ depend on booting DOS?! I almost can't believe it. Then again, Norton _is_ rather known for not-so-good software. At least on the Mac.


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## MisterMe (Jun 27, 2006)

First off, the last DOS-based version of Windows was Windows Me. Win XP has a DOS-like shell, but it is not DOS. As for Norton requiring DOS, this was certainly true for its early Windows-based apps. As a *Norton 2004* subscriber, I have no evidence that *2004* or later versions require the CLI.


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## fryke (Jun 27, 2006)

He's talking about Norton Ghost, though, the disk imaging tool. Maybe they boot to DOS in order not to be booted into the OS to be ghosted.


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## Westy (Jun 27, 2006)

Yeah fryke is right, we (still) use dos to get an image onto our computers.  I suppose if you can make a dmg of an NTFS partition in Disk Utility,  I wouldn't need DOS.

So can you only boot from an XP install disk, or can you boot from other things such as linux install disks?


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## fryke (Jun 27, 2006)

I haven't tried it myself, really... The only thing I tried, shortly, was Vista Beta 2, but that would've required me to do some funky partitioning, and I didn't want to do that. I guess you'd get some interesting info from the linux crowds. I know they got linux installs working before BootCamp, but that doesn't do anything for DOS, really. BootCamp, theoretically, would. But Apple only supports XP SP 2 (very specifically so).


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## Westy (Sep 14, 2006)

Well I found a way to do it, so I'll post it up for reference.

Firstly, using nero, I started a new bootable CD and used the contents of a DOS Bootdisk. 

Then I installed rEFIt on the Macbook (http://refit.sourceforge.net/), which is a custom bootloader.

I put the CD in the drive and turn on the Mac.   rEFIt detects the DOS boot CD and allows me to boot the Macs into DOS.


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## Mikuro (Sep 14, 2006)

Thanks for the update. That's pretty cool. It's good to know Intel Macs are flexible.


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## miyel (Oct 7, 2006)

Hi Westy,

I have your same situation.

Where can I find the NDIS DOS drivers for the Intel mac's NIC?

Thanks in advance for your help.


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## Curiosity (Oct 7, 2006)

You can set up a DOS environment with DOSBox.  If you do a Google search, you can find it.  I have been running several kinds of DOS programs using it.  It seems to work all right.  Things run more slowly than on a PC, however.


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## nixgeek (Oct 8, 2006)

Curiosity said:


> You can set up a DOS environment with DOSBox.  If you do a Google search, you can find it.  I have been running several kinds of DOS programs using it.  It seems to work all right.  Things run more slowly than on a PC, however.



This is true, but the original poster was looking to see if it could boot to DOS so that it could be cloned using Norton Ghost.  Norton Ghost works in DOS.

There is another solution called G4U that runs on NetBSD.  Of course, it's not as flexible as Ghost but it is open source and can technically image any operating system on any x86 computer (and should theoretically now support Macs).  You can use this with an FTP server or you can image using an external drive.  The G4U website is filled with information on how to use it in various scenarios.

The only caveat with this is that unlike Ghost, it images the ENTIRE drive which could take a long time and make the image very large.  Thankfully, the creator of G4U has provided solutions on how to make the image smaller by writing zeros to the unused blocks.


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## miyel (Oct 8, 2006)

I already booted the "Intel Mac Mini" to DOS and run Ghost (like Westy did), however I cannot make the network card work under DOS, because I do not have the right NDIS driver and so Ghost cannot dump images over the network  

nixgeek: Does DOSBox include the network driver for the "Intel Mac Mini" ?

Westy: which NDIS driver did you use to make the deployment?


For further information about ghost and the NDIS drivers, please read:

http://www.tinyempire.com/notes/norton-ghost-boot-disks.htm


Thank you all for your kind help


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## nixgeek (Oct 8, 2006)

Miyel, DOSbox is an emulator that allows you to run DOS on it in order to run any older programs that require a true DOS environment (this is especially useful on non-Windows, non-x86 systems).  It doesn't have anything to do with booting into DOS for use with Ghost.  As for the driver, I don't know if Apple is still using the Broadcom chipset with the Intel Macs or if they're using Intel's wireless chipset.  You can try downloading the NDIS drivers from either Intel or Broadcom.


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## Westy (Oct 12, 2006)

On the Macbook pro the wired Network card is a marvell yukon.  If you go here: http://www.marvell.com/drivers/search.do and just search for "yukon".  (Not sure if that'll be the same for your macmini, but if you put windows on it and check device manager, you should be able to work it out.)

HOWEVER, I can't say for definate the drivers they provide actually work on a macbook.

For my purposes I tried to use the DOSODI driver (I connect a netware server over IPX.  DON'T JUDGE ME).  It found the card when the driver was loaded, but it didn't actually work. 

In the end, I just used target disk mode and plugged them into a pc, and ran ghost from windows, which took a long time doing it one at a time.


UPDATE: Well the DOSODI driver DOES work on the MacBook, I just didn't setup my net.cfg right (an ID. 10T error). So yeah, give the NDIS driver a try.


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## miyel (Oct 16, 2006)

Thank you very much Westy,

I am getting closer now.

I do not use Novell, so I downloaded the

Yukon DOS NDIS2 Driver 8.23.1.3 6/29/06

http://www.marvell.com/drivers/driverDisplay.do?dId=113&pId=16

The NIC was recognized and the driver loaded at startup but ghost's dhcp requests were never transmitted by the macmini's NIC.

Maybe I just need to wait for a newer version, the Novell DOSODI that you used is dated 9/8/06.


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## elvey (Aug 4, 2008)

Reviving this ancient thread. 
I want to run SpinRite w/o removing the HD of a MBP (it takes a *long* time with a MacBook Pro, unlike with a MacBook).  
As reported elsewhere, a normal SpinRite (FreeDOS-based) CD will boot on an Intel Mac such as the MacBook Pro (I've done this myself.) But it can't be used - no keyboard or mouse drivers load.  So I'm wondering if Westy's solution from post 7 works - I imagine it depends on which DOS Boot disk he used - clearly the DOS that comes with SpinRite, FreeDOS, doesn't have the requisite drivers.

Something from BootDisk.com? 

Or perhaps DOSBox would do the trick, but I doubt it, since it's an emulator.  Its wikipedia page says "DOSBox also supports running image files of games and software originally intended to start without any operating system."  This image was made with DOSBox.

I suspect HD problems, as my HFS+ catalog has corrupted twice in the last month, and applications are crashing left and right.  (Repaired with fsck_hfs's -r option: Rebuild the catalog file on the specified file system, incidentally - something Disk Utility can't do.). Standard diagnostic and memory tests (including memtest and Disk Utility) find nothing. 

Thoughts?  I'll update this as I can.  

UPDATE:
This interview indicates it won't work with SpinRite 6.0, but 6.x or 7 might have it, but they don't exist yet.    For now, I'm trying SystemRescueCD, which includes MHDD, which does not rely on the BIOS.

I have VMware Fusion; I wonder if I could use that.  Will try that too.


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## elvey (Aug 6, 2008)

SystemRescueCD 1.0.4 downloaded and booted fine, but it just includes a floppy image of MHDD, which I was unable to find/use, and I didn't find any tools on it that were useful for the issue I have.  I did find a CD ISO image of MHDD (ver4.6, off HDDguru.com) that is supposed to be bootable, but it wouldn't boot in my MBP.


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Aug 6, 2008)

MS-DOS does not run on Apple computers, so that's probably why you can't boot those CDs.

Just because there's an Intel processor inside the computer does not mean that it's an MS-DOS/Windows-running computer.


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## elvey (Aug 6, 2008)

@ElDiablo:
Uh...  not true.  Are you not familiar with VMware Fusion, or Parallels?  Or Boot Camp?
With the latter, the ONLY OS running is Windows...
And with the SystemRescueCD I mentioned, it runs Linux...


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Aug 6, 2008)

Sorry, what I _meant_ was:



> MS-DOS does not *natively boot* Apple computers, so that's probably why you can't boot those CDs.



I never meant to insinuate that those operating systems can't be _run_ on/under Apple computers/Mac OS X, I just meant that they (MS-DOS, specifically) won't natively boot the machine (without assistance from things like BootCamp for native booting, or a virtualized environment, like Parallels and Fusion).

I was thinking MS-DOS, as there is a "System Rescue" bootable CD that runs MS-DOS.  My mistake.

Please post the link to the bootable CD image you downloaded, and then we can try it ourselves to see what booting problems we have and possibly fixes/workarounds.

My only other suggestion would be to download it again, perhaps -- or, simply check the MD5 sum to ensure that there was no corruption in the download (we had an MS proxy server at work that would corrupt Linux ISO downloads for some reason).


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## elvey (Aug 7, 2008)

There are 3 CDs I tried to boot.  
The SpinRite one (commercial software; can't just give you a copy).
SystemRescueCD 1.0.4 downloaded and booted fine
CD ISO image of MHDD (ver4.6, off HDDguru.com) that is supposed to be bootable, but it wouldn't boot in my MBP.

I don't think it was download corruption problems; the SpinRite CD boots fine on a regular PC, as does the MHDD CD, but FYI:
$ md5 mhdd32ver4.6*
MD5 (mhdd32ver4.6.iso) = ab3971bf25ad333304509bcc5a1e11dc
MD5 (mhdd32ver4.6iso.zip) = f8e30535c025645e32d49cf75e18abf8


The MHDD CD failed to load himem.sys, but it did boot into some sort of DOS; I couldn't do anything but run 'dir'.

If I can put the 140K spinrite.exe on a dos boot CD that works on a macbook pro, I might have something.  

And again, the linux os just runs directly on the machine.  Perhaps you've never tried it, but I have; you can take a Windows XP install CD and boot an Intel mac off it;  you'll get pretty far along in the install process too; not all the way, of course. 

The MHDD CD is here: 
http://hddguru.com/download/software/mhdd/mhdd32ver4.6iso.zip
(where i said it was: at
http://hddguru.com/, click on MHDD, then "Last version of MHDD, CDROM iso-image" links to it)


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## MisterMe (Aug 7, 2008)

elvey said:


> ...
> 
> And again, the linux os just runs directly on the machine.  Perhaps you've never tried it, but I have; you can take a Windows XP install CD and boot an Intel mac off it;  you'll get pretty far along in the install process too; not all the way, of course.
> 
> ...


You have a fundamentally flawed premise. You appear to be saying that a Mac can boot DOS because it can boot an operating system other than MacOS X. Linux has nothing to do with Windows or DOS. *Boot Camp* allows Intel Macs to boot Windows XP. However, Windows XP has only a distant relationship with DOS. Linux has none at all. It simply does not follow that the ability to boot Windows XP or Linux means that you can also boot DOS. You can't DOS on Mac hardware; only in a virtual environment like *Parallels Desktop*.


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## elvey (Aug 7, 2008)

MisterMe said:


> You have a fundamentally flawed premise.
> 
> You appear to be saying that a Mac can boot DOS because it can boot an operating system other than MacOS X.


I don't think I'm saying that at.  Perhaps you misinterpreted "supposed to be bootable", by which I was simply differentiating from something that was "not supposed to be bootable", such as a pure data volume.


> Linux has nothing to do with Windows or DOS. *Boot Camp* allows Intel Macs to boot Windows XP. However, Windows XP has only a distant relationship with DOS. Linux has none at all. It simply does not follow that the ability to boot Windows XP or Linux means that you can also boot DOS. You can't DOS on Mac hardware; only in a virtual environment like *Parallels Desktop*.


*I'm not saying an Intel Mac can boot into and run DOS programs...  I'm asking if/how it can be done, and providing the information I do know in order to try to get there.*  I'm *asking* if there are tricks to make it possible, and *stating* that I know there are tricks to make XP bootable.  If those tricks (e.g. drivers and/or a BIOS compatability mode) don't exist/haven't been figured out yet, and comments here suggest they don't, then I have my answer.


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## elvey (Aug 7, 2008)

The info on SpinRite itself is contradictory. 

From the documentation:


> SpinRite completely bypasses the system's motherboard BIOS software when used on any
> standard hard disk system.


But the interview says SpinRite is very dependent on the BIOS.


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## nixgeek (Aug 7, 2008)

EDCC and MisterMe are correct.  DOS cannot be booted on any Mac, even an Intel Mac.  DOS has NO support for EFI.  GNU/Linux supports not only EFI on the Intel Macs, but OpenFirmware on the PowerPC Macs, hence why it boots there.


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## nixgeek (Aug 7, 2008)

elvey said:


> The info on SpinRite itself is contradictory.
> 
> From the documentation:
> 
> But the interview says SpinRite is very dependent on the *BIOS*.



*BIOS*...not EFI, which is what the Intel Macs use.  The Intel Macs do not use the antiquated BIOS found in all PC motherboards for years now.


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## Westy (Apr 17, 2009)

Sorry to necropost, felt like a trip down memory lane to time when I used to work with Macs.



elvey said:


> If I can put the 140K spinrite.exe on a dos boot CD that works on a macbook pro, I might have something.



The DOS bootdisk I used was a Windows 95 bootdisk, which I got from: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm.  It worked well enough to load ghost and copy a hard drive image across IPX. That was with a first generation MacBook Pro, and when boot camp was still in beta (of course that didn't matter since I used rEFIt to bootload)

I have a feeling that I had problems with the later models, but I can't remember if that was due to trying to create a ramdisk in dos or not.  I don't have access to a Intel Mac anymore so I can't even test it.  

Hope that helps.


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