Boot to DOS on Intel Macbook

[Westy]

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.

[fryke]

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.

[MisterMe]

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.

[fryke]

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.

[Westy]

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?

[fryke]

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).

[Westy]

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.

[Mikuro]

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