Quote Originally Posted by A. Jorge Garcia
On my WIN box, format a: /s is no longer supported. So I either format it with system files or I create a rescue disk!
Expected that, since ME "doesn't" include real mode DOS.

I tried formatting with system files from a WIN95 box and tried booting on a WIN98 machine. This did not work as the c: was not found. I think this is because it was missing io.sys and msdos.sys.
Unless it's Win95B or C it won't read FAT32 (wasn't invented yet). So probably that's your problem.

So, I tried formatting with system files from the WIN98 box and everything now works with only the following files on the DOS doot disk:

autoexec.bat
command.com
io.sys
msdos.sys
drvspace.bin
Yup, seems correct to me

What is drvspace.bin???
This is the DriveSpace driver for MS-DOS. DriveSpace is an extended version (bigger disks, long filenames) of DoubleSpace, a disk compression program shamelessly ripped from Stacker by Microsoft somewhere in the mid '80s.