27 Jan
2017
27 Jan
'17
8:16 p.m.
Yippie!
But what a long haul it was.
Just getting the data on a disk that I could read was a nightmare. I bought a USB 3.5
floppy drive (Sabrent SBT-UFDB, $19 at Frys), and it does not write 720K reliably.
Comments on the net say it does not work, under windows 7 lots of errors, but bringing up
in Linux (Fedora) it sort of does work. Remember to unmount so that it flushes the data
out to the floppy!
After several back and forth tries with abort, retry, fail errors, I finally got xtidecfg
to run on the target (Compaq model 1, the luggable XT).
Next, I could not flash the EEPROM. Turns out I had one 74F573 in upside down. $100
Digikey overnight later, I got one (several, I spared all the parts and the EEPROM just in
case).
OK now XTIDE comes up on boot, and responds with the timeout screen and lets me select the
floppy for the boot.
I have a Compact Flash adapter and card, while I wait for the soldering iron to heat up
and make the power cable for it, I wanted to ask, what are the next steps?
FORMAT, or FDISK /MBR?
What is the recommended way to initialize the CF flash and put a system on it?
Anything special to do, so that I can use the whole 2GB of the flash?
Thanks to anyone who has been there and done this...
Randy
27 Jan
27 Jan
9:09 p.m.
I just did this for cards based on the Lo-tech CF card adapter in both a
original XT and also a PC Convertible (5140) . I found that not all CF
cards work especially on the version in the Convertible, but can greatly
increase the likely hood of success buy wiping the first few
"cylinders" of the CF card. Then boot DOS from a diskette , first run
fdisk make sure the partition you create is marked as active, then
format with the /S option to transfer the system files over. I rarely
had to do the fdisk /mbr. I was playing with cards from 16MB up to 4GB
and even a 4GB microdrive. I settled on a 256MB card which is plenty
for DOS. I got some 128MB and 256MB cards on eBay really cheap.
Paul.
On 2017-01-27 9:16 PM, Randy Dawson wrote:
Yippie!
But what a long haul it was.
Just getting the data on a disk that I could read was a nightmare. I bought a USB 3.5
floppy drive (Sabrent SBT-UFDB, $19 at Frys), and it does not write 720K reliably.
Comments on the net say it does not work, under windows 7 lots of errors, but bringing up
in Linux (Fedora) it sort of does work. Remember to unmount so that it flushes the data
out to the floppy!
After several back and forth tries with abort, retry, fail errors, I finally got xtidecfg
to run on the target (Compaq model 1, the luggable XT).
Next, I could not flash the EEPROM. Turns out I had one 74F573 in upside down. $100
Digikey overnight later, I got one (several, I spared all the parts and the EEPROM just in
case).
OK now XTIDE comes up on boot, and responds with the timeout screen and lets me select
the floppy for the boot.
I have a Compact Flash adapter and card, while I wait for the soldering iron to heat up
and make the power cable for it, I wanted to ask, what are the next steps?
FORMAT, or FDISK /MBR?
What is the recommended way to initialize the CF flash and put a system on it?
Anything special to do, so that I can use the whole 2GB of the flash?
Thanks to anyone who has been there and done this...
Randy
9:13 p.m.
On Sat, 28 Jan 2017, Randy Dawson wrote:
I have a Compact Flash adapter and card, while I wait
for the soldering
iron to heat up and make the power cable for it, I wanted to ask, what
are the next steps?
FORMAT, or FDISK /MBR?
It is not clear what you are attempting to do.
If you have a drive that looks like an XT drive with controller to the
computer, and it has not been used before, then
MS-DOS would normally want a low-level-format, which presumably does not
need to be done in this case, and for which FORMAT.COM is absolutely no
help, anyway. Low-level-format was done by IBM's "Advanced Diagnostics",
or by third party programs, or by doing a jump to code in the ROM of the
controller.
If it doesn't need low-level-format, then the next step is partitioning
(or do you already have a FAT16 partition on it?), for which you use
FDISK. NOT FDISK /MBR. FDISK when it creates the partition, will create
the partition table and Master Boot Record in the first sector.
MS-DOS from V2.00 to V3.30 is limited to 32MB.
Compaq MS-DOS 3.31, and any MS-DOS 5.00 and above supports up to 2GB
drives.
FAT16 in NTFS and other systems that support it can go to 4GB. But,
MS-DOS uses a SIGNED long 32 bit int, permitting drive sizes from
-2147483648 to 2147483647. Yes, there are some parts of MS-DOS that
support negative file sizes and drive sizes
If it is already low-level-format'ed and partitioned, then FDISK /MBR
(which was not always documented) will rewrite the partition table and
Master Boot Record.
THEN you want to FORMAT x: /S where x: is the drive letter.
/S of FORMAT tells it to also put the 3 OS files on it:
IO.SYS (hidden file that must be in specific location)
MSDOS.SYS (hidden file that must be in specific location)
COMMAND.COM reasonably "normal" file that can be copied with a
"normal"
file copy.
(Or IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM, COMMAND.COM if you were using PC-DOS)
At that point, it should be fully bootable!
Although some hardware might require specific content in root directory
files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT .
You should still create a DOS directory, and copy all of the other DOS
files into there, such as FORMAT.COM, FDISK.COM, DEBUG.COM, etc.
Putting all of those in the root directory will work, but is a bad idea.
In early versions of MS-DOS, just about all of the DOS executable programs
were .COM Later, as they started to exceed 54K, they started using
.EXE, but NAMING them .COM "for compatability". Now, they are probably
all .EXE since MICROS~1 can not do a "Hello, World" in less than 64K.
What is the recommended way to initialize the CF flash
and put a system on it?
no idea. I just laid out the MS-DOS steps to prepare a hard disk.
Run CHKDSK
Find your copies of LINK.EXE and EXE2BIN.EXE , which you will need for
assembler and compilers. Originally, they came with MS-DOS. Then for a
while MS-DOS said that they came with the compiler, and the compiler said
that they came with MS-DOS.
The MS-DOS executables (including LINK and EXE2BIN) will balk at running
on a version of DOS other than what they came with. For THAT, V5.00
includes SETVER , which lets MS-DOS lie about its version for such
programs.
Anything special to do, so that I can use the whole
2GB of the flash?
Need to use DOS V3.31 or above to get past 32MB, other than that,
it would
be a function of the adapter? and, of course FDISK, . . .
Prior to V3.31, the work around was to break up a drive into multiple 32MB
partitions.
(BTW, MB to FDISK is 2^20 (1048576), NOT the silly numbers used by drive
peddlers, such as 1000 * 1024.)
11:13 p.m.
Simple way I got several XT-IDE working:
- Boot with freedos boot disk
- FDISK /MBR
- FDISK and create ONE 31MB partition (note it is 31MB and not 32MB)
- Reboot
- Format C: /s /u (the /u is very important)
- REBOOT. There is a bug on freedos that a copy command gives a heap
corruption after a format
- Do whatever you want, even creating a D: partition of 2GB
This is what I did in many CF cards that didn't worked before.
2017-01-28 0:13 GMT-02:00 Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>:
On Sat, 28 Jan 2017, Randy Dawson wrote:
Need to use DOS V3.31 or above to get past
32MB, other than that, it would
be a function of the adapter? and, of course FDISK, . . . Prior to V3.31,
the work around was to break up a drive into multiple 32MB partitions.
(BTW, MB to FDISK is 2^20 (1048576), NOT the silly numbers used by drive
peddlers, such as 1000 * 1024.)
I have a Compact Flash adapter and card, while I
wait for the soldering
iron to heat up and make the power cable for it, I wanted to ask, what are
the next steps?
FORMAT, or FDISK /MBR?
It is not clear what you are attempting to do.
If you have a drive that looks like an XT drive with controller to the
computer, and it has not been used before, then
MS-DOS would normally want a low-level-format, which presumably does not
need to be done in this case, and for which FORMAT.COM is absolutely no
help, anyway. Low-level-format was done by IBM's "Advanced Diagnostics",
or by third party programs, or by doing a jump to code in the ROM of the
controller.
If it doesn't need low-level-format, then the next step is partitioning
(or do you already have a FAT16 partition on it?), for which you use
FDISK. NOT FDISK /MBR. FDISK when it creates the partition, will create
the partition table and Master Boot Record in the first sector.
MS-DOS from V2.00 to V3.30 is limited to 32MB.
Compaq MS-DOS 3.31, and any MS-DOS 5.00 and above supports up to 2GB
drives.
FAT16 in NTFS and other systems that support it can go to 4GB. But,
MS-DOS uses a SIGNED long 32 bit int, permitting drive sizes from -
2147483648 to 2147483647. Yes, there are some parts of MS-DOS that
support negative file sizes and drive sizes
If it is already low-level-format'ed and partitioned, then FDISK /MBR
(which was not always documented) will rewrite the partition table and
Master Boot Record.
THEN you want to FORMAT x: /S where x: is the drive letter.
/S of FORMAT tells it to also put the 3 OS files on it:
IO.SYS (hidden file that must be in specific location)
MSDOS.SYS (hidden file that must be in specific location)
COMMAND.COM reasonably "normal" file that can be copied with a
"normal"
file copy.
(Or IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM, COMMAND.COM if you were using PC-DOS)
At that point, it should be fully bootable!
Although some hardware might require specific content in root directory
files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT .
You should still create a DOS directory, and copy all of the other DOS
files into there, such as FORMAT.COM, FDISK.COM, DEBUG.COM, etc.
Putting all of those in the root directory will work, but is a bad idea.
In early versions of MS-DOS, just about all of the DOS executable programs
were .COM Later, as they started to exceed 54K, they started using .EXE,
but NAMING them .COM "for compatability". Now, they are probably all .EXE
since MICROS~1 can not do a "Hello, World" in less than 64K.
What is the recommended way to initialize the CF flash and put a system on
it?
no idea. I just laid out the MS-DOS steps to prepare a hard disk.
Run CHKDSK Find your copies of LINK.EXE and EXE2BIN.EXE , which you will
need for assembler and compilers. Originally, they came with MS-DOS. Then
for a while MS-DOS said that they came with the compiler, and the compiler
said that they came with MS-DOS.
The MS-DOS executables (including LINK and EXE2BIN) will balk at running
on a version of DOS other than what they came with. For THAT, V5.00
includes SETVER , which lets MS-DOS lie about its version for such programs.
Anything special to do, so that I can use the whole 2GB of the flash?
28 Jan
28 Jan
12:01 a.m.
On Sat, 28 Jan 2017, Alexandre Souza wrote:
Simple way I got several XT-IDE working:
- Boot with freedos boot disk
- FDISK /MBR
- FDISK and create ONE 31MB partition (note it is 31MB and not 32MB)
It SHOULD be possible to create an almost 2GB partition with DOS 3.31 or
above. Has to be "almost 2GB", since size is -2147483649 to 2147483647,
instead of 0 to 4294967295 ("almost 4GB")
31MB means that that partition is probably FAT12, usable even with DOS
2.00 to 3.30.
Why the FDISK /MBR , particularly followed by FDISK ? That rewrites the
Master Boot Record, which includes the partition table, which is then
also done by the FDISK.
FDISK /MBR (formerly undocumented) was very handy by itself for removing
boot sector virus, without altering anything else.
- Reboot
not normally required in MS-DOS; a
FREEDOS quirk?
- Format C: /s /u (the /u is very important)
/u
was added with 6.00? prevents FORMAT from paying attention to previous
content, and objecting if you format different parameters
- REBOOT. There is a bug on freedos that a copy
command gives a heap
corruption after a format
That's too bad. Not normally required with MS-DOS.
- Do whatever you want, even creating a D: partition
of 2GB
Prior to DOS 3.31, there were some third party DOS extenders for larger
drives, even some kludges to use MSCDEX (network redirector in 3.10 and
above) to make that computer see the drive as being on a network instead
of local (the way MS-DOS could see a 2/3 GB CD-ROM)
2:40 a.m.
Thanks Alexadre!
I thought I was so close when I finally got XTIDE to recognize my flash card.
FDISK worked OK too.
FORMAT did not, and the error was:
Drive not ready
I thought there was something else wrong, my bus size on XTIDE config, who knows.
I reflashed, but that failed, locking me up.
Pull JP1 to get it to boot, then put it back on while power on, got me back up to reflash
and clear the errors.
Reducing the partition size in FDISK did the trick.
FORMAT C: /S put the system on and now I boot from the flash!
Thank you so much.
Randy
________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Alexandre Souza
<alexandre.tabajara at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2017 8:13 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: I finall flashed my XTIDE rev 1, now what?
Simple way I got several XT-IDE working:
- Boot with freedos boot disk
- FDISK /MBR
- FDISK and create ONE 31MB partition (note it is 31MB and not 32MB)
- Reboot
- Format C: /s /u (the /u is very important)
- REBOOT. There is a bug on freedos that a copy command gives a heap
corruption after a format
- Do whatever you want, even creating a D: partition of 2GB
This is what I did in many CF cards that didn't worked before.
2017-01-28 0:13 GMT-02:00 Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>:
On Sat, 28 Jan 2017, Randy Dawson wrote:
Need to use DOS V3.31 or above to get past
32MB, other than that, it would
be a function of the adapter? and, of course FDISK, . . . Prior to V3.31,
the work around was to break up a drive into multiple 32MB partitions.
(BTW, MB to FDISK is 2^20 (1048576), NOT the silly numbers used by drive
peddlers, such as 1000 * 1024.)
I have a Compact Flash adapter and card, while I
wait for the soldering
iron to heat up and make the power cable for it, I wanted to ask, what are
the next steps?
FORMAT, or FDISK /MBR?
It is not clear what you are attempting to do.
If you have a drive that looks like an XT drive with controller to the
computer, and it has not been used before, then
MS-DOS would normally want a low-level-format, which presumably does not
need to be done in this case, and for which FORMAT.COM is absolutely no
help, anyway. Low-level-format was done by IBM's "Advanced Diagnostics",
or by third party programs, or by doing a jump to code in the ROM of the
controller.
If it doesn't need low-level-format, then the next step is partitioning
(or do you already have a FAT16 partition on it?), for which you use
FDISK. NOT FDISK /MBR. FDISK when it creates the partition, will create
the partition table and Master Boot Record in the first sector.
MS-DOS from V2.00 to V3.30 is limited to 32MB.
Compaq MS-DOS 3.31, and any MS-DOS 5.00 and above supports up to 2GB
drives.
FAT16 in NTFS and other systems that support it can go to 4GB. But,
MS-DOS uses a SIGNED long 32 bit int, permitting drive sizes from -
2147483648 to 2147483647. Yes, there are some parts of MS-DOS that
support negative file sizes and drive sizes
If it is already low-level-format'ed and partitioned, then FDISK /MBR
(which was not always documented) will rewrite the partition table and
Master Boot Record.
THEN you want to FORMAT x: /S where x: is the drive letter.
/S of FORMAT tells it to also put the 3 OS files on it:
IO.SYS (hidden file that must be in specific location)
MSDOS.SYS (hidden file that must be in specific location)
COMMAND.COM reasonably "normal" file that can be copied with a
"normal"
file copy.
(Or IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM, COMMAND.COM if you were using PC-DOS)
At that point, it should be fully bootable!
Although some hardware might require specific content in root directory
files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT .
You should still create a DOS directory, and copy all of the other DOS
files into there, such as FORMAT.COM, FDISK.COM, DEBUG.COM, etc.
Putting all of those in the root directory will work, but is a bad idea.
In early versions of MS-DOS, just about all of the DOS executable programs
were .COM Later, as they started to exceed 54K, they started using .EXE,
but NAMING them .COM "for compatability". Now, they are probably all .EXE
since MICROS~1 can not do a "Hello, World" in less than 64K.
What is the recommended way to initialize the CF flash and put a system on
it?
no idea. I just laid out the MS-DOS steps to prepare a hard disk.
Run CHKDSK Find your copies of LINK.EXE and EXE2BIN.EXE , which you will
need for assembler and compilers. Originally, they came with MS-DOS. Then
for a while MS-DOS said that they came with the compiler, and the compiler
said that they came with MS-DOS.
The MS-DOS executables (including LINK and EXE2BIN) will balk at running
on a version of DOS other than what they came with. For THAT, V5.00
includes SETVER , which lets MS-DOS lie about its version for such programs.
Anything special to do, so that I can use the whole 2GB of the flash?
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