• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Booting from a Compact Flash (XT-IDE)... How?

DaCiRo said:
Hi Stone.
You do?. Wow! I though this was almost impossible. How many 360K disk in total takes to store MSDOS 6.22.
Click to expand...
I don't know exactly -- I never transferred the entire 6.22 package to 360K disks. I only made a boot disk. It contains; FORMAT, CHKDSK, SYS, XCOPY, DOSKEY, FDISK, DISKCOPY, MEM and LIST.COM and QE.exe in addition to the three system files required to boot. But I would guess it might take 12 or 13 disks for the complete set of disks.
 
This may sound off the wall so to speek but another option you can try is just a later generic ISA multi i/o card with a 1.44 meg 3.5" floppy drive and DR Dos 7. Ok the 16 bit portion isn't used but I understand that's for the IDE controller anyway. A few members in the past have reported successfully booting DR Dos 7 off 1.44meg floppies this way on XT class machines in the past in similar discussions
 
Last edited:
DaCiRo said:
"Insert the 1st disk of MSDOS 6.22 in drive A and Ctrl+Alt+Del to start installation".
Click to expand...
You are getting this error because the MS-DOS 6.22 installation program looks at the disk label in order to determine if you have the disk in the drive. When you copy all the files to the hard drive then run the install, the setup program only sees your hard drive's label, which doesn't match the label that is on Disk 1 of the installation floppy.

SerDrive mounts the Image as a bootable virtual floppy disk, leaving the disk label intact. You simply start SerDrive with the first disk image. When prompted for disk 2, you close SerDrive then open it again with the next disk image. It's just like swapping the floppy disk.

I'm happy to walk you through this over the phone. Just drop me a PM if you need help.

Hope that helps.

Heather
 
DaCiRo said:
How many 360K disk in total takes to store MSDOS 6.22?
Click to expand...

If i can trust my old notes from many moons ago.
360K was 13 disks
1.2Mb was 4 disks
720K was 6 disks
1.44Mb was 3 disks
Many of the files on the disks were compressed.
 
*sigh!*

You guys are making this SO difficult.

Use Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=3702)

Get Images of MS-DOS ( http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/dos.html )

Install Virtual PC, create a new VM with a small virtual HD. Mount the first disk of the DOS install set as Drive A:

Boot the VM. Switch the drive A: to the next disk as requested by the installer.

Set up the VM just like you want the SD Card

Insert the SD Card into your laptop. and mount it as Drive D:

FDISK the drive. Reboot the VM

Format D: /S

Xcopy C:*.* D: /s

That should be it.
 
Al Hartman said:
...
Insert the SD Card into your laptop. and mount it as Drive D:

FDISK the drive. Reboot the VM

Format D: /S

Xcopy C:*.* D: /s

That should be it.
Click to expand...

I don't think that will work as MS-DOS FDISK will not set more than one partition in a system active when I've tried it. However the disk image can be made with any virtualisation platform as described, and then the raw disk image copied out to the media, provided the disk image is no larger, for example using dd on linux or an equivalent utility on Windows.
 
Last edited:
Virtual PC 2004 works on Windows XP all versions. (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down...243&e6b34bbe-475b-1abd-2c51-b5034bcdd6d2=True) That's what I used. Sorry, I gave the link to the newest version that I now use to run XP under Windows 7.

Virtual PC 2007 works on Windows XP Pro and up.

If you don't think you can make a partition the Active one on the 2nd drive, then skip making a VM, mount the SC Card as the C: drive, mount the first floppy and pretend that it's a regular hard drive.

I had no problems using this method.

You can even attach a 3.5" 1.44mb floppy as drive A: as long as you use 720k floppies or tape over the density hole. Then, using a USB drive, make a bootable disk using the Virtual PC program, and copy the contents of the DOS directory to floppy. It will take a few 720k floppies to do it that way.

I avoided all this hassle by building an XT-FDC card eventually, and was able to boot 1.44mb disks as drive A:.

An external Parallel BACKPACK 3.5" drive will take a 5.25" 360k floppy if you open the case, run a cable from the board inside to the 5.25" Floppy drive, and run the configuration program to tell the BP board you hooked up a 5.25" 360k drive.

I also used Laplink to transfer files from my old Gateway Colorbook (486sx 25mhz) to the 5150 through a serial laplink cable.

If you have the XT-IDE card and a serial Laplink cable, you could use the serial link built in to boot the computer over the serial connection. ( https://code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/wiki/SerialDrives ) But, I've never tried this.
 
BTW...

Is it a real XT-IDE board, or is it a Lo-Tech CF Card Adapter?

If it's the latter, I don't think you'll be able to read/write to the card on a 16/32/64 bit computer.

Even using the Lo-Tech adapter in my 486 motherboard, the drive that booted fine on my 5150 wouldn't work in the 486. I would have had to reformat it.
 
I use an old laptop running dos 6.22 and with USB drivers loaded i can access a CF card plugged in to a cheap chinese card reader via the USB port, It makes transferring files easy peazy, another option i use is i made a bootable CD with Dos 6.22 and USB drivers and boot either a laptop or desktop via the CD-ROM drive into dos 6.22. Never used a VM before.
 
Al Hartman said:
*sigh!*

You guys are making this SO difficult.
Click to expand...
I suppose difficulty is relative. There are definitely a million different ways to do it. I wanted to explain why it wasn't working (disk labels) and an easy way to install the CF in the actual machine using the disk images, SerDrive, and a serial cable.

The good thing about your method is that you can easily see that the installation is going to work before the final step of copying it to the real hardware. :thumbsup:

Heather
 
Malc said:
I use an old laptop running dos 6.22 and with USB drivers loaded i can access a CF card plugged in to a cheap chinese card reader via the USB port, It makes transferring files easy peazy, another option i use is i made a bootable CD with Dos 6.22 and USB drivers and boot either a laptop or desktop via the CD-ROM drive into dos 6.22. Never used a VM before.
Click to expand...
Could be a good thread to start on what drivers you use, your autoexec and config.sys setup etc.
I'm sure it would be useful the a few folk here.

As Helen mentioned there's many ways to skin a cat so to speak.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Could be a good thread to start on what drivers you use, your autoexec and config.sys setup etc.
I'm sure it would be useful the a few folk here.

As Helen mentioned there's many ways to skin a cat so to speak.
Click to expand...

Yep several ways if you got the software and hardware to do the job but things get difficult if you haven't, There has been a couple of threads Re USB and Dos, might still be around, I'll sort out what i got later, 2am here ZZzzz.
 
Al Hartman said:
Is it a real XT-IDE board, or is it a Lo-Tech CF Card Adapter?

If it's the latter, I don't think you'll be able to read/write to the card on a 16/32/64 bit computer.

Even using the Lo-Tech adapter in my 486 motherboard, the drive that booted fine on my 5150 wouldn't work in the 486. I would have had to reformat it.
Click to expand...

Hi Al, is this with a recent XTIDE universal BIOS build? Likely there is an issue in CHS translation, but I thought it was fixed quite a while back.
 
Interesting, thanks. Do you still have the CompactFlash card in question?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top