Same issue and workaround as Dark Seed: Dark Seed Installation

Thank you, for both answers. It seems I forgot to thank you for Dark Seed, sorry about that 🙁

OK, an issue arose with your solution. The C: drive disapears when I boot to the floppies. I tried both 0.74 and a more recent (though not the most recent,) development build. Is the ability to keep previous mounts something relatively new?

If you use IMGMOUNT with the HDD image and BOOT with the floppy images as I wrote in the example, it works for me in 0.74(-3) and SVN.
It's actually the same method recommended to FORMAT a blank HDD image and install DOS on it.

Perhaps you use IMGMOUNT with the floppy images and then use "BOOT -l a" or "BOOT -l c" which can lead to the kind of problem you describe.

OK, maybe I'm using the wrong tool to create the HD20.img file, then. I'm using WinImage custom format, specifying 512 byte sectors, 32 sectors/track, 2 heads, and total size of 40960 sectors (thats' 640 tracks) for a total size of about 20 MB (thus the HD20.img name I'm assuming.) I cleared out everything in the autoexec section of my conf file and then at the z:\ prompt I typed the following

imgmount c d:\games\flops\hd20.img -t hdd -size 512,32,2,640
boot d:\games\flops\d6-1.img d:\games\flops\disk-1.img d:\games\flops\disk-2.img d:\games\flops\disk-3.img d:\games\flops\disk-4.img d:\games\flops\disk-5.img

After the imgmount, I get the C mounted as message from DOSBox, then I get several mounting image messages followed by booting MS-DOS. The DOS 6.22 install screen comes up saying no valid HD controler found, I F3 twice to get to the A:\> prompt, type "C:" and get C: is not a valid drive specification.

So, I then, to match your text more precisely, tried it a little differently:

mount y d:\games\flops
y:
imgmount c hd20.img -t hdd -size 512,32,2,640
boot d6-2.img disk-1.img disk-2.img disk-3.img disk-4.img disk-5.img

This resulted in the exact same thing 🙁

I then noticed that the HD20.img file was only 201KB and I'm wondering if I need a different tool to create the HD image. If so, what is the tool you use?

Disk images should be of the standard type, where the file size matches the capacity. Perhaps you created a sparse image, one that dynamically resizes, which is not supported by DOSBox.

The BXIMAGE tool from Bochs is what I've used, and you should be able to find suitable empty images via search engine.

Sorry, next question: How did you create the image with bximage?

I downloaded it (well, I downloaded bochs and extracted the utility,) and used the following command:

bximage -q -func=create -hd=20M -imgmode=flat HD20.img

This reported a CHS of 40/16/63

So I used the following command in DOSBox (path stripped to simplify)

imgmount C HD20.img -t hdd -size 512,63,16,40

and got: "Can't create drive from file"

So, I'm guessing I did something wrong 🙁

I don't think you did anything wrong, it's just that you haven't got the procedure down, evidently. 😉

By default, DOSBox tries to mount an HDD image as a DOS FAT volume, but your image is completely blank: no MBR, no partition table, no DOS format.
Mount your blank image like this: imgmount 2 HD20.img -t hdd -size 512,63,16,40 -fs none
(note the "2" instead of "c", and "-fs none" to indicate there is no file system)
Then you can BOOT a DOS disk to FDISK and FORMAT drive C:
After the image is formatted with DOS, you can mount it as you were before.

There doesn't seem to be a super detailed guide, but try this one: Install DOS in DOSBox

OK, now it works 😀 Thanks!!

Wish the reboot worked. Probably a reason why it doesn't, but was a "slight" hastle having to type everything in again. But I can live with that. A lot easier than trying to do everything in another emulator. Every one I've tried is either slow as <blank> or too much trouble to get working.

I do wish there was a utility to create an image with Partition & Formatting included with the creation process, though.