Boot to DOS on Intel Macbook

W

Westy

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

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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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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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.
 
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.
 
@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...
 
Sorry, what I meant was:

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

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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