Booting MS-DOS

Optimised CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT

A friend of me spent hours (or days ?) to figure out how to modify CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT for the fastest booting and the lowest possible conventional memory usage.

CONFIG.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS I=B000-B7FF INSTALLHIGH C:\DOS\KEYB.COM GR,,C:\DOS\KEYBOARD.SYS COUNTRY=049,437,C:\DOS\COUNTRY.SYS SWITCHES=/F/N BUFFERS=20,0 FCBS=1,0 STACKS=0,0 FILES=40
AUTOEXEC.BAT
@ECHO OFF PATH C:\DOS SET TEMP=C:;C:\TMP LH C:\DOS\DOSKEY LH C:\DOS\MOUSE

Thanks you very much Karsten for sharing your knowledge on this with me (but I am even more thankful that you told me about Linux and convinced me to switch to it)

Adding a menu with boot parameters

If you want to select which drivers should be loaded and which not, you can use a boot-menu (needs MS-DOS version 6 ?)

CONFIG.SYS
[MENU] menuitem=C01,No drivers menuitem=C02,SCSI CDROM menuitem=C03,ATAPI CDROM menuitem=C04,Network menudefault=C01,04 [C01] [C02] DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\ASPI8XX.SYS DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\SYMCD.SYS /D:SYM001 [C03] DEVICE=C:\DOS\TEAC_CDI.SYS /D:TEAC-CDI [C04] [COMMON] SWITCHES=/F/N BUFFERS=20,0 FCBS=1,0 STACKS=0,0 FILES=40 numlock=off lastdrive=E
AUTOEXEC.BAT
@ECHO OFF GOTO %CONFIG% :C02 LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX /S /D:SYM001 GOTO END :C03 LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX /S /D:TEAC-CDI GOTO END :C04 LH C:\3COM\LSL-214.COM LH C:\3COM\3C5X9.COM LH C:\3COM\IPXODI.COM :C01 :END