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Dos boot disk on 5.25" floppy

Are you using the floppy drive from the PC-7200 in the Win7 machine? Or is it a different drive all together?
 
Haemogoblin said:
As the guy on here's says, the CMOS battery is low and needs refreshing. Well sadly i dont have a new battery to replace the old one, however it would seem that the machine wont boot properly unless the cmos is set correctly.

In fact, using the high density floppy i had formatted to 360kb, i was able to get "boot error" to appear.
Click to expand...
The CMOS battery has nothing to do with it whatsoever. All that does is store drive info, etc., so you don't have to enter it manually each time you boot the machine. It may be a minor PITA, but entering the required info manually suffices as far as the machine is concerned.

AFAIK, you can not successfully format a high density 5.25" to DD specs and get it to boot since track 0 is not compatible with the other format and track 0 is what booting is all about. You need a bonafide DD disk. This is contrary to the situation with 3.5" disks where you can fake the drive out by punching a hole or, conversely, covering up a hole. Get a 360K disk and go at it from there. Don't format the 360k disk on a 1.2 mb drive, either. Not all 1.2 mb drives can write 360k disks that 360k drives can read. Some 1.2 mb drives will format 360k disks that *only* 1.2 mb drives can read.

Hope this helps.
 
I was under the impression that the Sharp he's trying to boot had a HD disk drive. In which case, you shouldn't have to mess with DS/DD disks or the 360k format at all.

-Ian
 
The Sharp does have a HD floppy drive. The disk that came with the Sharp initially with the setup app, is a HD floppy. Also if i can't format the 360kb disk in a 1.2mb drive, then i have no actual means to format it. As the only working floppy drive i have, is a half height, 1.2mb TEAC hooked up the my main win7 PC.

The issue is, that the IBM AT setup disk is designed to expand itself on to a 360kb disk. When I tried using a 1.2mb it just throws back an error asking for another disk.
 
If you format and write a DD disk as 360K on a 1.2M 5.25" drive, you should have no problem reading it in another 1.2MB drive. It's only when you try to read it with a 360K drive that you get into trouble. You can obviously read a 360K floppy created on a 360K 5.25" drive using a 1.2M drive.
 
Haemogoblin said:
The issue is, that the IBM AT setup disk is designed to expand itself on to a 360kb disk. When I tried using a 1.2mb it just throws back an error asking for another disk.
Click to expand...

Where did you get the image from? Is it a Windows EXE or a DOS one?

Actually, it does not really matter. Open it up in WinImage and extract all the files, then create a boot CD and add all those files to it. Boot to the CD, format a 1.2mb disk so that it is bootable, and copy all the IBM reference files to the floppy (including autoexec.bat and config.sys, but not io.sys, msdos.sys or command.com).

That should work then. If it still does not then I'd say pull the drive from the SHARP and connect it to your win7 machine and do some testing with it just to make sure it works (ie format a disk and boot with it). The two drives may have a different head alignment or the one in the Sharp may be defective, this would help you rule out both of these cases.
 
Haemo: I don’t know if you’re going to be able to make this AT BIOS Setup Disk with what you’ve got there.

That ATDG207.EXE file is a strange little program.
It’s a self-extracting file but it seems pretty picky about what it’s working with.

I tried it on my disk copying workhorse, with the EXE file on a 1.44 MB floppy as A:
It doesn’t like that – told me it had an error on track 27 (on two different disks - I think it thinks it's on a 360 KB floppy).

So then I swapped a couple cables and made the 360KB floppy the A drive, and changed it as such in the CMOS. That worked but the EXE wanted to extract to B:
I hooked up a 360KB as B: and it wouldn’t go. All that was with MSDOS 6.

So, it seems the program needs the EXE file on a 360 KB floppy in A, and needs to extract it to a 360 KB floppy in B.

I went to a 5150 with two 360 KB drives.
Tried first with DOS 2.10, and that was no good as the program said ”requires at least DOS 3.3.”
So I booted the 5150 with DOS 3.3.
The program asks for a blank low density floppy, for which it means a formatted blank low density floppy because a completely blank floppy doesn’t work, so we know it doesn’t try to format it first.
After a few tries with differing results, I gave up.
I got garbage characters on the screen, I got lockups/freezing part way through the extraction, and again part way through the extraction I got “diskette error, try another?” three times with three brand new disks that all formatted fine.

I think the next step might be trying it on a 5160 XT to see if that makes any difference.

Could the EXE file be corrupt?
Could it only be able to run on an AT or AT compatible?
 
I had also tried to convert that image and ran into the same problems; I was going to try the RAW version but got distracted and ran out of time.

I think all the OP needs is a (preferably self-extracting) image of that setup disk copied to a bootable HD disk; unfortunately I can't play with this any more at the moment. Anybody else?

m
 
I played with the RAW image to try and get it onto a 1.2mb disk with no luck either. I simply could not get it to boot from the 1.2mb disk. The disk appears to be some sort of custom boot of PC DOS 2.0, you cannot get out of the menu sysytem and you cannot seem to simply copy the files onto a bootable disk.

I still say if you pull the 1.2mb drive from the sharp machine and use it to format a 1.2mb disk as 360k with the setup data it might boot when you put the drive back into the sharp machine. Otherwise you may need to get your hands on a 360k drive and disk.
 
Hi guys

Out of the job lot of used floppies i recently bought off ebay, i had two 360kb floppy disks. One was trash and the other actually formatted. So this morning, using a 1.44 usb floppy drive, i booted the computer up and tried extracting the IBM setup exe.

I used the command "A:\atdg207.exe B:"

This directed it to the low density drived i have prepared. So what happened? it copied over fine, it disk even works on my main PC! Put it in the Sharp and i recieved a Boot failure error.

I've had the floppy drive out of the sharp this morning and hooked up to the Win7 system and it will not work. The drive has a bank of dip switches, which i have no info on at the moment. I do have the service manual, so will look at that over the weekend as i'm travelling to see family shortly.

I assumed the Sharps floppy drive would be set as primary floppy, first off the cable, before the twist. However i tried both positions and could not get the drive to do anything other then spin constantly.

Back in the sharp the drive works fine, well it tries reading disks, the LED only light ups ect.

BTW the internal floppy drive of the 7200, IS FD-HD - Model number - gm3505e

Here are two questions i'd like to ask you guys, as you have been at this game a lot longer then I.

1. Would writing the 360kb image come out differently, depending on if the drive writing it was low or high density drive?
2. I do recall the disk that came with the sharp, before i frakked it up. Was DOS 2.11, well it wasn't actually DOS as there where only 3-4 files and only one EXE. But i do know it was DOS 2.11. Could i be throwing versions of DOS that are too new for the machine to handle?

Many thanks!
 
Haemogoblin said:
. . . I assumed the Sharps floppy drive would be set as primary floppy, first off the cable, before the twist. However i tried both positions and could not get the drive to do anything other then spin constantly.
Click to expand...

Huh? I have no idea what you mean by "primary" drive, but then I'm not Sharp savvy. Also, in a PC the connector before the twist is the B drive and the one at the end (after the twist) is the A drive. Perhaps the Sharp is different.
 
Sorry Ole my bad!

Thats sort of what i meant, I'm still learning at the moment :p

The Teac i bought for the main PC, has different jumper setting which determine where on the cable it goes. I assumed the drive i had removed from the Sharp would be set as A: aka the primary drive inside the machine. Sorry for the confusion, that was my fault.
 
Haemogoblin said:
Sorry Ole my bad!

Thats sort of what i meant, I'm still learning at the moment :p

The Teac i bought for the main PC, has different jumper setting which determine where on the cable it goes. I assumed the drive i had removed from the Sharp would be set as A: aka the primary drive inside the machine. Sorry for the confusion, that was my fault.
Click to expand...

No worries. :) I'm just trying to sort this out.

On a PC, almost all drives are set (jumpers or otherwise) to be B drives by default. The twist in the cable turns it around. That's why the first (untwisted) drive on the cable is the B drive and the one after the twist is the B. If you only have one drive then you need a cable with a twist. Rarely does one have to play with jumpers because the twist does it all.
 
Haemogoblin said:
I've had the floppy drive out of the sharp this morning and hooked up to the Win7 system and it will not work
Click to expand...

Well that seems to indicate that there is a problem with the drive that came with the Sharp.

Here is what I would try, take that 1.2mb drive that you bought (that did not come with the Sharp) and connect it to the Sharp and see if it boots.

Since you know that the 1.2mb formatted as 360k with the IBM disk image on it boots in your modern machine with the drive you bought, it stand to reason that everything there works.

If this works, then the floppy drive that came with the sharp is the problem, if it does not then you can start looking somewhere else (not sure where).
 
Hi guys

I recieved a kind email back from Paul who gave me the machine. I had emailed him asking about the boot disk, if he had made it and if so, how and on what computer.

I hope he wont mind me posting a section of his message back to me here.

It was Compaq DOS 3.31 using a 5.25 HD drive in a Compq Deskpro 386 and (quite important this) a DSDD diskette.

I think the command was:

format b: /1 /4 /s

format b: /1 /4 /s

/1 because the drive in the Sharp would only read a single sided diskette.

/4 because it says so here : http://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/format.html

/s to transfer the boot partition.

His first point caught my eye, only reads single sided?? I've had the drive out and it's a HD floppy drive. But! it's not a half size drive, more like a quarter. My Teac is a half height drive and the stock one in the Sharp isn't as tall. I did notices a jumper that said DS - SS, possibly double sided, single sided?

I wont have access to the system till monday, but this email certainly gives food for thought.
 
Hmm when i try Format /1 /4 /s with my Teac it errors, with something about track 0

I've tried the Teac in the Sharp and tried various boot disks and it STILL insists there is either a boot disk error or no system disk, i'm feeling utterly lost now.


*update*

Well i managed to sort the Track 9 error by using a new unused floppy disk and formatting it. And partial sucess!!! i managed to get the sharp to boot! Tho once on the dos prompt, i discovered i could not execute any of the exe files on the floppy. Without being told there was a reading disk fault :-(
 
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