I finall flashed my XTIDE rev 1, now what?

[Alexandre Souza]

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:
>
>> 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.)
>