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Tandy DOS Install Issues

Eudimorphodon said:
On the topic of trying to stick to the "original" DOS on these machines, has anyone found an image of the "hard disk utilities" disk that was apparently included with the 1000HD? (May have also been included with the 1200?) The DOS 2.11 that was included with the *original* 1000s does support hard disks but they didn't include FDISK or a formatter on the main MS-DOS disks.

I've never heard of anyone bothering to try to use DOS 2.x on an XTIDE, but I've been vaguely curious if it's doable.
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Concerning DOS 2, why would you want to use that version unless that was all you had?
 
Eudimorphodon said:
On the topic of trying to stick to the "original" DOS on these machines, has anyone found an image of the "hard disk utilities" disk that was apparently included with the 1000HD? (May have also been included with the 1200?) The DOS 2.11 that was included with the *original* 1000s does support hard disks but they didn't include FDISK or a formatter on the main MS-DOS disks.

I've never heard of anyone bothering to try to use DOS 2.x on an XTIDE, but I've been vaguely curious if it's doable.
Click to expand...
I believe the Tandy 1000HD used a western digital controller, so it may have used whatever utilities went with the MFM controller used.
 
Hi, I have my original tandy 1000 RL HD disks, I can scan and upload them if you like...
Having original OS is fine, but I myself run msdos 6.22, windows 3.0, updated deskmate.
 
TANDY 1000 RL/HD (25-1450/51) Initializing Hard Drive Faxback Doc. # 1308

Note: Use the Smart Drive Installation Backup diskette supplied with the
hard disk.

Reboot the computer and insert the diskette from above in drive A. When
the desktop screen appears, <TAB> to the programs box and highlight
HINSTALL.PDM and press <ENTER>. Follow the prompts which appear on the
screen.

NOTE: If you used a blank diskette label Smart Drive Installation Backup
diskette in drive A, this will now be referred to as the

Using the Reinitialization Disk:

Insert the Reinitialization Disk in drive A then press reset. When the
desktop screen appears, <TAB> to the programs box and highlight
HINSTALL.PDM and press <ENTER>. Follow the prompts which appear on the
screen.
 
when I installed dos 3.3 on my 1000sx I think i remember that I byte patched the tandy utilities from dos3.2 because there were differences in things like mode.com that tandy had that were not in the microsoft versions and some but not all did a dos version check.
 
LinkedBlade said:
In my case, i'm just trying to get dos bootable on a hdd (xt-ide sdcard) and play some games.
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get rufus and use freedos option on sd card, which system are you trying to run it in?
Id check for default hdd controller address and go up from there..
msd will give you memory addresses?
or mem?
I'd use msdos 6.22 if found a copy... best version dos..
Id have checkit, spinrite, pkzip, mouse.com, cdrom driver, univbe, and qemm as basic install,
 
LoneBlackBear said:
get rufus and use freedos option on sd card, which system are you trying to run it in?
Id check for default hdd controller address and go up from there..
msd will give you memory addresses?
or mem?
I'd use msdos 6.22 if found a copy... best version dos..
Id have checkit, spinrite, pkzip, mouse.com, cdrom driver, univbe, and qemm as basic install,
Click to expand...
Tandy 1000 (25-1000)
 
I did see this sd image from this youtube video here. However the Internet Archive link is down as of me posting this.
 
So... just for laughs I dusted off QEMU and fiddled around with some DOS boot disk images, and my takeaway is that DOS 3.2 generically doesn't like disks bigger than 32MB.

It turns out that Tandy's "you're not allowed to boot this DOS on non-Tandy machines" block on the Tandy versions of 3.2 doesn't seem to work in QEMU, at least this version; I was able to boot Tandy 1000 SX recovery disk set with no problem. The block *did* work on the versions of 3.30 included with the Tandy 1000 SL and TL, but the version included with the Tandy 3000 works so I used that as the outgroup. I also laid hands on copies of IBM PC-DOS 3.21 and a generic OEM MS-DOS 3.21 to compare Tandy's version, to see if there was any difference.

Here's the short form version of my results on different size disk images:

8GB:
  • DOS 3.30: Works perfectly
  • Tandy 1000 3.2: acts the same as it does on the XTIDE; you can run FDISK, you can format and sys the resulting drive (while getting that partition error), and you can copy stuff to the disk, but it won't boot.
  • IBM 3.21: It's actually worse than Tandy; you can partition the disk, but you'll get a "format failure" when you try to format it. However, *if* you format the disk with another DOS first it's happy to read it, and you can even "sys c:" it. But it won't boot either.
  • "Generic" MS-DOS 3.21: acts like Tandy's. You can format the disk (with an error) and copy stuff to it, but no booting.
  • I tried several methods to try to outsmart the problem, like making the partition smaller than the maximum size, partitioning with 3.30, parititioning *and* formatting with 3.30 and just running sys c: on the formatted volume... nothing worked.
30MB:
  • Tandy 1000 3.2: You get that "Bad Partition Table: Format Failure" message when you first format C:, but it doesn't matter, the resulting disk works and boots.
  • IBM 3.21: Works absolutely perfectly
  • Generic 3.21: Same as Tandy; works after you ignore the partition error message.
33MB:
  • All versions of 3.2 fail exactly the same ways they fail with an 8GB disk.
Of course now I'm wondering if anyone's gotten versions older than 3.30 to behave with XTIDE drives with "normal" size flash disks. Just for laughs I downloaded Compaq OEM versions of 3.1 and 2.12 and gave them a test. And... you know what's great? 3.1 fails; it partitions and formats with no complaints, but instead of just hanging like 3.21 is it's actually throwing an error:

Screenshot 2024-10-21 at 1.16.38 PM.png

BUT... Compaq DOS 2.12 for the Compaq Portable works perfectly. Partitions, formats, boots, no problem. Weird.

Lesson here seems to be you need 3.30 or later unless the stars are perfectly aligned.
 
The link from post #31 for and sd card image of ms-dos 6.22 came up finally and I was able to download it here. I imaged it to my sd cards, both a 2GB and 32GB card and they both seem to work. They hang on "Starting MS-DOS..." No luck yet.

The 5.25" drive came in going to try and make some 3.30 discs and try the original procedure.
 
Some great dos history, talks of size limitations, I think it has to do more with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit issues, as Tandy 1000s start at 8-bit addressable and go up from there.

dos.fandom.com

MS-DOS Version History

This is a list of MS-DOS versions released to the public. Microsoft DOS was released through the OEM channel, until Digital Research released DR DOS 5.0 as a retail upgrade. With PC DOS 5.00.1, the IBM-Microsoft agreement started to end, and IBM entered the retail DOS market with IBM DOS 5.00.1...
dos.fandom.com dos.fandom.com
 
Agent Orange said:
Does anyone know if the Tandy 1000 and Tandy 1000SX BIOS chips are the same animal?
Click to expand...

Physically or in terms of code? The oldest 1000s have the BIOS split across 2 ROM chips instead of one, but later ones had a single 16K ROM like an SX does.

Codewise, there were two versions for the 1000, v01.00.00 and v01.01.00; the oldest one has some timing issues with DMA, so it was usually considered mandatory to upgrade it to add a hard disk. Meanwhile, the SX and the EX both use version v01.02.00. It's slightly unclear if it's precisely the same binary between the two. So far as I'm aware the only substantive change it has from the original 1000 is the code to look for function keys being held down at startup to change things like the CPU speed.

LoneBlackBear said:
Some great dos history, talks of size limitations, I think it has to do more with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit issues, as Tandy 1000s start at 8-bit addressable and go up from there.
Click to expand...

"8 bit addressable" in what way, exactly? Are you talking about FAT filesystem limits? FAT 8 was never used for a PC-compatible operating system, FAT12 is used on floppy disks and hard disks formatted under MS-DOS version 2.x, and FAT16, which came in several different flavors, was used for all other Microsoft DOSes prior to Windows 95, IE, not DOS anymore. None of this has anything to do with "32 bit issues".

It's actually a huge rabbit hole to go down to lay out all the various BIOS and other limits that have affect how large a disk you can use under DOS (and also put some limits on partition placement), but the TL;DR is the one that's been unchanged all the way from the birth of the PC is a limit in the BIOS INT13h disk access call that limits classic DOS (with no specific device drivers to overcome it) to understanding a maximum of just under eight (binary) gigabytes. In theory any version of DOS that supports hard disks through that interface should be able to install on any disk that has a valid partition somewhere in that range. But in practice older versions have all kinds of weird bugs.


LinkedBlade said:
The link from post #31 for and sd card image of ms-dos 6.22 came up finally and I was able to download it here. I imaged it to my sd cards, both a 2GB and 32GB card and they both seem to work. They hang on "Starting MS-DOS..." No luck yet.
Click to expand...

If you had an MS-DOS 5 or later floppy handy I'd suggest that booting that and running "fdisk /mbr" *might* fix it. But it is worth noting that that image is specifically aimed at 486+ era PCs, not XTs, and the BIOSes of those machines might be doing LBA translation differently from XUB.
 
On the 1000's there just isn't that much exotic anything on the motherboard. So, it kind of stands to reason that the boot glitch must originate in the BIOS. Perhaps someone who has the wherewithal could download the 1000 BIOS and see what's going on with that Tandy only DOS glitch. One would think that down through the years a patch or hack would have surfaced for that.
 
Agent Orange said:
On the 1000's there just isn't that much exotic anything on the motherboard. So, it kind of stands to reason that the boot glitch must originate in the BIOS. Perhaps someone who has the wherewithal could download the 1000 BIOS and see what's going on with that Tandy only DOS glitch. One would think that down through the years a patch or hack would have surfaced for that.
Click to expand...

What Tandy only glitch are you talking about?
 
Agent Orange said:
I thought we were talking about the Tandy only blessed DOS for the 1000?
Click to expand...

… wait, the thing that the Tandy 1000 versions of DOS complain if you try to run them on something else? The 1000 BIOS has Tandy specific strings in it, I’m sure the boot loader just looks for them.
 
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