Looking for Philadelphia/South Jersey Help

[natcha]

Hi,

I have a couple of operating systems I'd like to try installing on a Compact Flash Card but I don't have a 386/486 system with floppy drive. The two operating systems are Xenix 386 and IBM OS/2. I have all the 3.5" disks.

I was hoping someone in the Philadelphia/South Jersey region might let me bring the disks to your house and we spend a couple of hours trying to install the systems. I have both CF/IDE adapters for both desktop and laptop computers.

My utilimate purpose is to try running xenix and OS/2 (just for fun) on my Omnibook 430 or my Libretto 110CT.

Anyone up for an adventure?

Appreciate the help.

Bill
(Smithville, NJ)

 

[Maverick1978]

Bill, You might want to have a look at acquiring a USB floppy drive. Then setup a virtual machine with DOSBox or whatnot, mount your CF as C, Floppy as A, then have at it.

 

[natcha]

Well, I've tried using Virtual Box on my Windows 7 machine to install Xenix 2.3.1 from some images I have of the floppies. No luck.

But I was able to find a set of Xenix 2.3.4 images and they installed fine. So I now have a version Xenix running in a virtual machine. I even found a two disk set of Cobol for Xenix - tar images and they installed fine. So I guess I could program in Cobol - ugggggh.

Now to see if I an get it transferred to a compact flash.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

 

[BillT356]

If you are still looking for help or for a 486 system, I have a few desktops and towers you could have for cheep. w/monitors and keyboards. I'm in Barnegat, just a short ride up RT 9.

 

[natcha]

If you are still looking for help or for a 486 system, I have a few desktops and towers you could have for cheep. w/monitors and keyboards. I'm in Barnegat, just a short ride up RT 9.

A 486 system would be great. And you're only about 45 minute drive. Don't think I'd need a monitor. As long as it's VGA, I have an old LCD monitor that should work. I've sent you a message through the forum.

Thanks,

Bill
Smithville, NJ

 

[natcha]

Thanks to Billt356, I now have Xenix 386 2.3.4 running on a 486 tower computer. I put it on a 340mb microdrive, and it also works great on my Omnibook 430 and a Toshiba Libretto 100CT. I had to use an older version DOS - Version 3.3, which only supports a maximum of 32MB drive. But I can now read/write files from the xenix to the Dos side. Hopefully, I can put some tar files I have on the DOS side and then boot Xenix and copy them to the Xenix side to untar and install.

Now if someone could just make the Developers set of disks available.

Thanks again to Bill T. Nice meeting you today.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

 

[EvanK]

Gentlemen -- you should both join MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists) -- 386/486 stuff is much "too new" for us, but we can help with things like OS/2 and Xenix. We're at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/midatlanticretro. We have dozens of members across many states, and our physical museum is in Wall Township.