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Help with getting dos on a cf card with a modern pc

For those without a boot floppy, this is what worked for me:

- In PCem (the emulator) I created a virtual hard disk with 63 sectors and 16 heads (this is crucial!). Mine had 64 cylinders, giving a total disk space of 32 MB, but in theory it should be possible to create a much larger disk (if your DOS supports >32 MB drives).
- I mounted a DOS installation disk as drive A:, and booted the emulated computer.
- Using fdisk, I partitioned the virtual disk. Then I formatted it, transferred DOS (format c: /s), and closed PCem.
- I connected the CF card to my laptop and wrote the virtual disk to it (dd if=disk.img of=/dev/sdb in my case; YMMV).

The method described above works with an XT-CF card (at least for me).
 
R625 XUB works nicely on both Sergey 4.1 and Lo-tech v3 cards on my XT systems - I can boot from a large CF that has multiple 512M partitions on it easily, preimaged. Some reconfiguration of ROM image was necessary via the provided menu-driven tool.

If you want to configure the card in any way, you have to do it via this tool and flashing, so it's better to update XUB to latest right away.
 
I thought I would create a dos 6.xx CF. My issue is I can't find a bootable xx-dos 6,x bootable 720k disk(s) image anywhere. Apparently such a thing was never made. I now have the teac floppy. Any suggestions as to how I could do this? I managed to get a French version to boot from a disk 1 diskette, but it failed to do anything and I can't read French very well, except for erreur! ;)

I do have a dos 5.0 bootable CF, though I need to do some work on extracting the xx_ files. Could I use this in some way?

Gotcha after gotcha. I think someone should write a book called catch-22 or something (catch-5150?) :()

Maybe try @Cosi approach?
 
You could easily craft a bootable DOS floppy image for any version you like (with some caveats; for example, earlier versions of DOS only support 360k 5.25" disks, etc.):
- Go to WinworldPC and grab the desired version.
- Launch the emulator (i prefer PCem, but DOSBox-X will do the job here). Boot DOS from the first image in the installation bundle; if the setup program starts, quit it.
- Unzip the blank 720k floppy image attached to this post and "insert" (mount) it as drive B:.
- Run format b: /s
 

Attachments

  • 720k.zip
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I'm finding it difficult to get a bootable disk1 from any of the 7z files (that I have unzipped) The French one did boot and fail, so I guess I'm on the right track. I'm sure that most of these "images" from wnworld should boot direct in pcem? It would also explain why they won't boot from my 3.5 drive on my IBM 5150 PC.

I must be doing something stupid.
 
So I have downloaded from winworld https://winworldpc.com/download/c2bc3242-2663-c399-11c3-a7c29d255254
I have unzipped it to a folder. I start pcem (with the xt bios as don't have a pc one). It starts and says:
Insert diskette in Drive A:
Press any key.
I middle click (I'm on windows 10)
Disc>Change drive A>navigate to folder and pick Disk01.img
I press the any key :)
Back to Insert diskette

Assumption is that this disk is not bootable. But that does not make any sense. However it didn't boot on real machine either.

I have checked that drive A is 3.5" 1.44M, even tried the 3 mode whatever that is.

bah humbug

Gordon
 
It might be because the emulated machine doesn't support 1.44M drives. For the purpose of making the boot floppy you can use something newer – I just checked with a 386SX and it worked just fine.
 
There should be a couple of ROMs bundled with PCem (assuming that's what you're using), but you can download more from this GitHub repo. Put them in the roms subdirectory of the configuration directory (I'm sorry, you'll have to find it yourself on a Windows machine; on Linux it's located in ~/.pcem) and restart PCem – you should be able to see a long list of available setups.
 
With amibios I'm just getting WAIT.... I tried entering the cmos and standard settings, but no joy. Man this just gets more and more time consuming ...

I think it's looking for a non existent hard disk to boot from. Where are the boot options ... doh, this is so long ago in the past ... :rolleyes:
 
I think it's still looking for a bootable media disk. I changed the boot sequence to look for A:

Can you point me please to a bootable 6.x img file, I'd be very grateful or perhaps pm me?

Thanks for your help.

(Yet another adventure...) :biggrin:
 
Wait, didn't booting from a 386 help?
I hate to say that "it works on my machine"... but it does 😄
I've set up a "[386SX] Commodore SL386SX-25" computer with 4096KiB RAM and a 3.5" 1.44M drive as FDD1, and managed to boot Disk01.img from the link you shared. It's certainly a bootable image!
 
Well, I did have to get into the BIOS (ctrl-alt-exit whilst booting and set up a hard disk to match (type 40 I think).

Anyway fdisk'd and formatted. Note it boots into some dos menu app - like commander? or xtree,, so removed this and the mouse from autoexec.bat and now I can boot into C.

Now: how to do in Windows.
And I connected the CF card to my laptop and wrote the virtual disk to it (dd if=disk.img of=/dev/sdb in my case; YMMV).

I'm assuming my virtual disk is in the PCem folder and for me is called hd386sx (no extension) I do have the Ubuntu wsl2 app on my win10 setup.

I'm trying WinImage, but though I can load the CF card as my drive d: and the image and see it all I get : the current image format is not supported by the disk drive. doh doh doh.
 
So first I found that dd is under git for windows usr/bin, but couldn't figure out how to use it. Then found an article on dd for windows https://aeroquartet.com/treasured/dd for windows.en.html but that didn't work. Then saw your link. That wrote to the CF card nicely, but it won't boot on the real machine, no operating system.

edit: The CF card has the DOS folder and a file called WINA20.386 - not command.com etc. I guess a PCem artifact?

edit: The WINA20.386 is on the PCem virtual drive. I don't understand why Win32DiskImager didn't copy the command.com, config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

Thanks for all your help anyway Cosi, it is appreciated.

Gordon
 
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Can you boot your emulated machine from the image that you burned to the CF card? What does dir return? If it differs from the contents of your CF card, something's gone wrong with writing the image to the card.

gfmoore said:
Thanks for all your help anyway Cosi, it is appreciated.
Click to expand...
You're welcome. I didn't help much :)
 
I navigate to the CF card from the hard disk select but PCem won't let me select it. It wants an image. Can PCem actually read an actual drive?

Now when you say the image I burnt to the CF card, my understanding is that Win32diskimager (or dd) is writing the PCem hard disk image to the CF card and making that a real hard disk card? Or have I missed something. I wonder why it hasn't passed the other files though?



By the way I'd like to publicly apologise to the OP abruno17 for hijacking his thread. I've apologised privately as well. :(
 
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