[ct-user] Successfully booted DOS from CD and ran CT from USB stick

[N7MAL]

I have a small DOS partition on my hard drive. I made a bootable CD from an old WIN98SE boot 'floppy'. When I boot from the CD it doesn't even see the WinXP partition and treats the DOS partition as C: drive. I have, only, CT and a mouse driver installed on the DOS partition. When I'm finished contesting I just boot regularly to XP. The DOS drive then becomes D: and the CT files can easily be managed with any XP file manager. DOS runs really well in a P4 at 4ghz w/1gig of ram.
That is my solution to CTWIN running in XP. CT DOS is still the finest contest logging program available anywhere..!!!..
 
MAL               N7MAL
BULLHEAD CITY, AZ
http://www.ctaz.com/~suzyq/N7mal.htm
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: kd4d at comcast.net 
  To: ct-user at contesting.com 
  Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 16:24
  Subject: [ct-user] Successfully booted DOS from CD and ran CT from USB stick


  Good afternoon, all:

  I have been successful creating a MS-DOS boot CD, containing a
  minimal MS-DOS installation, and running CT entirely from a USB
  memory stick.

  I have not been able to test this in combat conditions yet, but
  it is working.  Any volunteers?

  I installed CT 10.002.001 on the USB stick and fired up the CQWW.
  CW sending seems to be working.

  The really neat thing about this is that I can download all of the
  CT files, cty.dat, and master.dta in Windows and write them to the
  USB stick in Windows.  Then, reboot from the CD and go.

  Basically, I booted the CD, with a minimal autoexec.bat and config.sys:

  autoexec.bat
  path=a:\;a:\dos71
  smartdrv a+ c+

  config.sys
  DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS /testmem:off
  DEVICE=emm386.exe noems
  DOS=high,umb
  FILES=30
  BUFFERS=20

  LASTDRIVE=Z

  The CD appears as a:.  My USB stick happened to be D:, but yours
  would probably be c:.

  I put the CT files in D:\CT10 and created a log directory
  d:\logs\ct.  I put master.dta and cty.dat in the d:\logs\ct
  directory (the way I like to configure), and entered
  path=d:\ct10;%path%.

  Then,
  D:
  cd logs\ct
  ct

  and started CT.

  Using this technique, I can run CT under pure DOS on any
  computer that supports booting from CD AND has bios
  recognition of a USB stick without affecting the computer AT
  ALL, without repartitioning the disk, and without permanately
  installing DOS.

  If anyone wants the procedure for creating the bootable CD,
  drop me an e-mail.  I am looking for volunteers to try this in a 
  real contest.

  73,

  Mark, KD4D
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