I'd like to set up an old system for exclusively running DOS games. I've tried using DOSBOX and other such things through XP...but it simply isn't the same. There always seems to be animation or sound issues.

The drive was converted to NTFS, and as far as I remember, DOS requires FAT or FAT32. Does it matter? DOS is not currently installed. How do I format the drive to FAT (or whichever) and then install DOS? Do I need fdisk? What are the exact parameters (my DOS skills are a little rusty)?

Any help getting me up and running would be greatly appreciated.You'll need a DOS boot disk with FORMAT.EXE (or is it .COM?) on it. Boot from the floopy and then just FORMAT C:.

You're right in thinking that an ordinary DOS session will not be able to see the contents of an NTFS-formatted partition.

Try that, and if it doesn't work, maybe you DO need to fdisk after all. fdisk is pretty self-explanatory though - worry not.You won't format an NTFS drive from a DOS bootdisk. You won't even see the drive!
I've upped a bootdisk here that contains Delpart. Unzip it and run the resulting bootdisk.exe with a diskette in the floppy drive. Use Delpart to delete all PARTITIONS and reboot. Now run Fdisk and create however many partitions you need. If you're using DOS 622 or below, don't format the partitions with this disk but use the format command on the DOS setup disks which will use FAT16.well, technicaly you don't need a FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32 drive to play dos games. my drive is ntfs and it plays DOOM II just fine. really the only reason you would change the formatting is to reduce the slack in the drive the BEST FS for that right now is NTFS.If you have DOS games that you want to run in real-mode DOS, then you will probably want to go with FAT16. I think FreeDOS and DrDOS support FAT32, but there is a chance the old DOS games may have issues with anything other than FAT16.

You will need a DOS boot disk, FDISK and FORMAT. If you still have an old version of DOS laying around then I would use that. MS-DOS 6.22 was the latest official release of DOS from Microsoft. DOS 7.00 and 7.10 came with Windows 95 and Windows 98 respectively, but I would stick with MS-DOS 6.xx, or FreeDOS or DrDOS.

Just run FDISK to remove the NTFS partition (I think DOS 6 will see it as a HPFS partition), then re-create a FAT partition, then reboot, then format c: /s.

Copy your games to the C: drive and you are in business.