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Gridcase 1530: How to boot from internal floppy?

Ozzuneoj

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2015
Messages
185
Location
PA, USA
I have a Gridcase 1530 with the red plasma display, floppy and hard drive. It overall works fine after I did some repairs on it two years ago.

The hard drive has a lot of clutter on it however, including a non-functional Windows 3.1 installation. I have attached a parallel CF card reader to copy all of the files from the hard drive in case there is anything valuable there, but I'd like to wipe the drive and start fresh. The issue is that I can't seem to figure out how to get it to boot from the floppy drive so I can wipe the hard drive. Is there a trick to this or is it some crazy process that requires a ROM chip and programming skills?
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Also, just out of curiosity, what exactly would I need to be able to boot from a ROM? I think that would be super cool, and I do have a TL866 USB EPROM programmer, if that would do the trick.


EDIT: Whelp... I tried to just do things "manually" and now it's missing a compatible command.com. Oops. I'll have to find a DOS 6.0 disk to make it work now. I really want DOS 6.22 though. Surely there is some way to get it to boot from a floppy while the hard drive is present?
 
Assuming the floppy drive is still working. The capacitors often need replacing in the 15xx series drives. You should be able to boot from floppy by pressing F while booting. If I remember correctly the was also H for HDD and maybe R for ROM.
 
https://flecom.net/yahoo-groups/RuGRiD-Laptop/files/ has the old Yahoo groups file listing. IIRC, there should be a replacement BIOS to allow the use of different hard drives and something to permit booting from a floppy. Sorry, I don't remember the exact files to do it. Maybe someone with more recent familarity with GRiD will provide better instructions.

not sure if there was a pre-modified BIOS but I used this guide


to put a different conner in my GRiD back in the day

to boot from floppy you just have to press the F key after you hear the boot beep (after it's done testing the memory)
 
Well, I know it's been a while, but thank you for the help guys! Pressing F during startup made it boot from the floppy without a hitch. I now have a clean 20MB hard drive with DOS 6.22 installed.

Is anything special required to switch to or enable the CGA output on this machine?
 
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