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HP OmniBook 430 original disk image

C

cshaxu

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Aug 28, 2024
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Recently I got a working OmniBook 430 with ROM 2.0 card. Everything is working great and I even managed to install Windows 95 on it:
Image_20241124223330.jpg

However the device doesn't have an original drive C came with it in the sale, and I'd like to try the original HP OmniBook 430 user experience.

Does anyone have the original disk image / zip archive of the drive C? I guess it probably comes with MS-DOS 6.20 and Windows 3.1, just like 530?

Thanks in advance!!
 
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I don't have an unfettered original copy, just a used hard drive that came with my 430. There's no backup on omnibooks.info either so it might be hard to find this. According the manual, the 430 appears to have shipped with MSDOS 6.22 only, which is indicative of what's included on the ROM card.

I'm interested in your Win95 install. I've been tinkering with mine, customizing the base install, configuring it for maximum free memory. I'll make another thread for that, maybe we can share ideas?
 

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Hey @maestro ! Thanks for your reply. I also had an OmniBook 600C which comes with MS-DOS 6.20 and WFW 3.11 with all the drivers and utilities installed, and I've seen screenshots of OmniBook 530 with the startup menu indicating the Windows 3.1 installation, that's why it made me think the OB 430 should have something comparable on drive C. Yeah it's a pitfall that there's no image for OB430 on omnibooks.info.

Regarding Windows 95 installation - my OB 430 has 4MB of RAM, and I used a 512MB CF card as the drive C. Firstly I used DiskGenius to convert the CF card's boot mode to HDD, and then put the CF card into the drive C. I used the 2.0 ROM card to OBFDISK and FORMAT /S to make the drive C bootable to MS-DOS 6.20. I then copied the Windows 95 installation files to a folder under drive C, and ran the setup from there. It's a bit slow, but that's pretty much it.

The only thing I did for the Windows 95 setup was the mouse driver - I followed something similar to load the obmouse.drv from my OB425 ROM card in SYSTEM.INI which works pretty well.
 
According to the OB 300-530 service manual, it looks like 430 and 530 may carry the same set of software (though the device drivers might differ a bit) -

I attempted to construct a working image of drive C for the OB 530 based on the files from omnibooks.info (it's not a full set of file, it says you need to install MS-DOS 6.20 and Windows 3.1 on your own and then copy those files to override the files on disk image) but it still misses a bunch of files, so it would be really nice if anyone here got a copy of the full files of OB 430 and 530 drive C image!

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Looks like you're right about Windows 3.1. I seem to remember reading that somewhere, Windows was preinstalled and couldn't be restored. I checked my own archives and it looks like the 430 only came with a floppy that didn't include the drivers or configuration files needed to setup Window 3.1, yet perusing the system.ini from the 430 hard drive suggests it was the same installation as the 425, all of the many customizations appear to be present. My guess is that HP intended the customer to send in their unit when the installation failed. Such a weird beast.

Here's a file list of the floppy, aka The Original 430 Experience. :D

omnibook/floppy/ob430:

ALARMMGR.EX_
APPTS.EX_
APPTS.HL_
BWCC.DL_
CCCDLL.DL_
DB.DL_
LLRA1.EXE
LLRA2.EXE
LLRA3.EXE
LLRA4.EXE
LLRA.BAT
LLRAWIN.EX_
LLRAWIN.HL_
LLRCI.DL_
LLRSTS.EX_
MSCOMSTF.DL_
MSCUISTF.DL_
MSDETECT.IN_
MSDETSTF.DL_
MSINSSTF.DL_
MSSHLSTF.DL_
_MSTEST.EX_
MSUILSTF.DL_
OBCOMPAN.IN_
OBCOMPAN.INF
OBCOMPAN.MS_
OBLINK.BAT
OMNIBOOK.BMP
PCTSI.IN_
PHONE.HL_
PHONE.XX_
README.TXT
RESTORE.EXE
SETUPAPI.IN_
SETUP.LST
TSI.INI
TSIMODEM.DL_
TSIVID.38_
 
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Woah super. I didn't know that OB 430 comes with a floppy! Would you be okay to share the image of this disk?
 
Amazing! Thank you for uploading this!

Regarding the original drive C image - the 1.1 ROM (for OB 425) can create a drive C but I think it's not for OB 430.
The drive C image generated by 1.1 ROM comes with HP MS-DOS 5.0 and a trimmed down version of Windows 3.1 which runs only on Standard Mode,
but the OB 430's 2.0 ROM comes with MS-DOS 6.20 just like OB 530 and OB 600..

That made me think the OB 530 drive C would be more similar to the OB 430. However, when I tried the OB 530 drive C packet, the drivers are incompatible.

Hopefully someone would have the fully loaded OB 430 drive C image for share :)
 
Yes, the 430 installation would be different since the ROM is not locking system files, but customization to the OS would be similar to the 425 and all the drivers/custom software from the 425 would be the same, so someone should be able to use the files and configuration from the 425 to construct a compatible image for the 430 themselves.

Although I agree, it sure would be nice to find an unfettered copy of the 430 hard drive image.
 
For the OB430 companion floppy disk - do you know how to use it?

Looking at the files, it's used for installing HP Appointment, HP Calc, HPPIM, HP Phone, TSI, etc.

However there's no executable to run the setup, but only "setup.lst" and "obcompan.inf" providing some information about the programs it may setup.

Do you by any chance know how to use this disk? Is this described in OB430 user manual / operation guide?
 
Wow, garbage-city! Not you my friend :) it's archive.org. I cannot edit descriptions, remove files, add files or do anything with a listing that I created, I can't even delete the listing. Everything results in an error message. So I just deleted my account and that seems to have worked but my dilapidated listing is still live!

You were right, there was at least 1 file missing from the archive... and it was setup.exe! Don't ask me how that happened. I'll find a way to get this to you, hang tight!
 
I think the floppy disk image is missing some files.

It's missing "setup.exe" and I found a working one from Windows 3.1 SDK.
Now figuring out the missing "phone.exe"...
 
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Attached the missing files to the OB430 companion floppy disk and the set up went through successfully.

Also I think I might have managed to restore a working copy of the OB430 drive C.. will upload later if anyone is interested.

What's included:
- MS-DOS 6.2 with startup menu (like OB 530)
- Windows 3.1 running on 386 Enhanced Mode
- HP Accessories (HP Calc, HP Appt) (from the OB430 companion disk)
- Drivers for PCMCIA and mouse comes from OB 425

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