Quick Start:- Create a brand new primary partition at the start of your first hard drive and ensure it is marked as the active partition. Then format the partition as an MS-DOS System Partition. This is usually done from an MS-DOS floppy diskette by entering format C: /s at the floppy's A:\> prompt.
A minimalist MS-DOS partition such as this only contains three files; io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com. Some may be hidden and different variants of DOS may well use a different trio of file names. Customising such a drive with autoexec.bat and config.sys files and related memory managment and drivers can produce a more productive partition, but keeping it at its most simple will allow most PCs to boot to such a partition - even when the hard drive moved from one PC to another. Indeed it is one method of creating an accessible hard drive on a PC that lacks either a floppy or a CD drive.
A:\>format C: /s
A:\>format C: /sys
A:\>sys C:
A:\>smartdrv
A:\>attrib -h -s -r *.*
A:\>xcopy A: C: