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Well this was alot easier than I thought.

Klee

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 24, 2010
Messages
319
I've been wanting a computer running CP/M for a long time. I was planning on running CP/M ver 3.0 on something but ended up with CP/M -86 because it was just so easy.

Found a 360k CP/M-86 for the IBM pc ver 1.1 boot disc.

As it works just fine on a 8088 XT clone mb with 256k ram running off a floppy I decided to install it on a hard drive.

System specs:
Beltron 8088 XT clone mb with 256k ram
Unknown IBM compatiable floppy controller
WD XT MFM controller with a 20mb microscience hard drive out of my compaq deskpro
Tandon "Dual Video" video card
Generic AT case with power supply.
360k floppy drive
So basicly the junk I had laying around.:cool:

The boot disc I used I found on the net somewheres , cpm86-bt.zip is the name of the file.

This boot disk loads a ram disk on bootup. I ended up entering setup.com and disabling it and saving the change to the floppy.

Next I dug out a Dos 3.31 boot disk and used fdisk to delete all the partitions.
Then I rebooted using my CP/M-86 boot floppy.
I next ran the hdmaint command and created a 8 mb partition on the 20mb hard disk.
Next I set the partition bootable and exited out of the hdmaint program.
Now I just used pip to copy all the files over from the floppy to the hard drive and rebooted into CP/M
And thats was it !!

I never realized it would be so easy!!

The boot disk I used does not have all the files of a full install , files also found somewhere on the net , so I still need to copy them over from my Win 98 pc running 22disk.

One word of advice , DO NOT run 22disk in a dos window on windows 98..........I went to format a floppy to CP/M and it made the floppy drive make a nasty clankgrrrrrruuuuhhhuuuuurrrrruuuuummmmm noise and then errored out. Rebooted into msdos mode and it works fine.



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Nice work! Perhaps this is what I'll do with the no-name XT clone board I found in our box 'o boards at work (after I finish replacing the decoupling caps...replace one, power on, another pops).

That 5.25" drive looks like the locking Fuji drives that the Leading Edge Model D used -- does it have head-load too?
 
Nice work! Perhaps this is what I'll do with the no-name XT clone board I found in our box 'o boards at work (after I finish replacing the decoupling caps...replace one, power on, another pops).

That 5.25" drive looks like the locking Fuji drives that the Leading Edge Model D used -- does it have head-load too?

Thanks!!

Head load ?

The floppy drive was used because it was on the top of my floppy drive pile. I'm pretty sure its a fujitsu.
 
Yep, head load. It'll make a click (well, more of a clunk) when the drive is selected and engaged, and another click when it disengages. Unlike most 5.25" drives, which have the head in constant contact with the floppy disk surface, the model of Fuji drives in the Model D had head load, which was a mechanism that pressed the read/write heads to the disk surface only when they needed to be, much like older 8" floppy drives.
 
You can get rid of the ugly drive behavior in 22Disk by deleting the Win9x port driver for the floppies and let Windows switch to real mode to access them.

But it's easier just to shutdown to DOS and do your work...
 
This turned out to be a very easy install , I had visions of having to make a custom bios and other tinkering with the guts of CP/M .

I am going to try the newer version listed in a post above on a 286 or a 386.
 
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