manually installing MSDOS...

[Dennis Boone]

 > I want to put MSDOS on the FAT partition and triple-boot the machine -
 > but the laptop has no floppy drive on it, so I can't just boot from
 > a DOS floppy and run SYS that way.

Three thoughts come to mind:

1. Netboot MS-DOS.  Haven't done it myself, but it seems to be possible
based on things I've read online.

2. Boot from a USB stick.  (If your hardware is new enough.)

3. Start a debian installer from the existing partition, and create
a new Linux install in the "dos" partition.  Use that to bootstrap
the re-install of the larger partition.

4. Carefully lick MS-DOS bits into place using mtools et al from the
debian partition.

All of this kind of stuff seems to require recursive approximation.*

Having other machines around to use as crutches always helps.

De

* i.e. trial and (mostly) error