MS-DOS 7.1 was first used in Windows 95 OSR2, and was updated with logical block addressing (LBA) for large hard disks, and FAT32 support. Its DIR command is also made Y2K compliant with the "/4" parameter. Its XCOPY command also outputs exclusively in Unicode, something that cannot be displayed in pure DOS without Windows, and was renamed to XCopy32.mod, with XCopy.exe and XCopy32.exe simply redirecting to XCopy32.mod.
Like with MS-DOS 7.0, you can add older utilities by running INSTSUPP.BAT in Other\Oldmsdos on the install media or by obtaining the self extracting OLDDOS.EXE archive from the web. It is worth mentioning that international releases of Windows 95 OSR2 and some European versions of Windows 98 have a bug that causes HIMEM.SYS to occupy 80k of conventional memory instead of the standard 1k. Microsoft released patches for these versions of Windows (Q170456 for OSR2 and Q197030 for 98) although some uses prefer to patch the files manually. MS-DOS 7.1 and 8.0 also have issues with not processing harddrive errors correctly in LBA mode, which was fixed in patch Q311561, a bug where phantom drives appear due to a LBA partition occurring inside of or after a non-LBA extended partition, and programs compiled with 16-bit Borland C crashing due to a change in one of COMMAND.COM's internal jump instructions.
Microsoft Operating System Versions |
Microsoft Operating System Versions:
MS-DOS: QDOS | 1.0 | 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.11 | 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.21 | 3.3 | 3.3A | 3.31 | 4.0 | 4.01 | 4.01A | 5.0 | 5.0A | 6.0 | 6.2 | 6.21 | 6.22 | 7.0 | 7.1 | 8.0 Windows 1.x: 1.0 | 1.01 | 1.02 | 1.03 | 1.04 Windows 2.x: 2.0 | 2.01 | 2.1 | 2.2 Windows 3.x: 3.0 | 3.0A | 3.1 | 3.11 | 3.2 Windows for Workgroups 3.x: 3.1 | 3.11 Windows 9x: 95 | 98 | ME Windows NT: 3.1 | 3.5 | 3.51 | 4.0 | 2000 | XP | 2003 Windows NT: Vista | Longhorn Server | Blackcomb Server Windows NT: Windows 8 | Windows 10 | Windows 11 Windows CE: 1.0 | 1.1 | 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.11 | 2.12 | 3.0 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 5.0 Windows Embedded: NT | XP Windows Mobile: 2003 | 5.0 Previous Windows Codenames: Janus | Snowball | Kato | Daytona | Chicago | Memphis | Millennium | Cairo | Odyssey | Neptune | Whistler | Longhorn | Blackcomb |