Startup Disk Contents

These are the files we keep on our startup disks.  These are the minimum files, although some of us keep additional files for various reasons.  Files identified with an asterisk (*) after it are version sensitive.  Of course, the disk is formatted with a "/s" to install the system files to the disk (format a: /s), so there is a COMMAND.COM and the hidden MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS files

AUTOEXEC.BAT
CONFIG.SYS
EDIT.COM *
EDIT.HLP *
EXTRACT.EXE *
FDISK.EXE *
FORMAT.COM *
HIMEM.SYS *
MSCDEX.EXE
MTMCDAI.SYS
SYS.COM *
XFER.BAT

The file MTMCDAI.SYS is Mitsumi's ATAPI CD-ROM driver.  You can use most ATAPI CD-ROM driver.  All bets are off if you aren't using an ATAPI CD-ROM.

This the content of our CONFIG.SYS file:

device=himem.sys
device=mtmcdai.sys /d:oemcd001
lastdrive=z


This is the content of our AUTOEXEC.BAT file:

mscdex /d:oemcd001


This is the content of the XFER.BAT file.  It is used to move the essential utilities to a Windows 95 computer so it can find the CD-ROM when starting Windows 95 for the first time.  Without the CD-ROM driver in the CONFIG.SYS, there won't be a CD-ROM to load drivrs from.  Running this file isn't necessary with versions of Windows later than Windows 95.  They install the CD-ROM support much earlier.

copy autoexec.bat c:\
copy config.sys c:\
copy mtmcdai.sys c:\
copy mscdex.exe c:\
copy himem.sys c:\

Last Updated: November 11, 2007