Eduquest 30 drive help

[jhorvath911]

So I’ve been working with my two eduquest 30s for a while now trying to get replacement hard drives working.

I am well aware of the switching the dos in rom chip with a xt-ide bios, but I’m not trying to use large drives and would like to keep the original dos in rom there.

I’ve been trying to use pqi disk on module devices, both the 256mb and 512mb, and have also tried compact flash 512mb to ide. With all of these devices the bios detects properly for the size I am able to fdisk and format but never able to boot. I always end up with one of a few different results either I get a missing operating system, starts to load then command.com error or in the case or the cf it just displays the letter “J” without going further.

These drives do work in my later eduquest 50 but not in the 30.

I also found another strange result. If I use a windows 95 boot disk to fdisk and format/s instead of a dos 5-6 disk then it will boot from the DOM. What is 95 doing different to the drive compared to an actual dos version?

I would appreciate any feedback.

 

[Jove]

This is not an answer, just a thought. Does 95 re-write the MBR by default?
try an fdisk /mbr to write the MBR after formatting DOS and see if it's recognized.

 

[jhorvath911]

This is not an answer, just a thought. Does 95 re-write the MBR by default?
try an fdisk /mbr to write the MBR after formatting DOS and see if it's recognized.

I have tried the fdisk/mbr plenty of times with no changes in behavior. I’m trying to figure out if the fdisk on the 95 writes something different about the mbr compared to dos.

 

[jhorvath911]

I found this interesting little blurb:

“
Windows95 - (MS-DOS 7) Basically the same as DOS 4/5/6 but adds 2

new partition types - 0E and 0F - which will be seen as

NON-DOS partitions by earlier DOS versions. Type 0E is

used for a Primary partition if INT13 Extension support

is present in the BIOS. Type 0F is used for an Extended

partition if INT13 Extension support is present.”

And I say it’s interesting because at one point I was trying to erase a mbr on this computer with some instructions I found in another article and I want to say that int13 wasn’t supported by the bios.