4

Early last year I posted a thread about this old laptop I've got: Need help restoring the OS of an "AST Premium Exec 386SX/20" laptop

The original HDD is long-gone. But it does attempt to boot from the IDE port. I have replaced the HDD with a modern SD Card to IDE adapter (2mm pin-pitch).

It starts booting FreeDOS but hangs after a few seconds after selecting one of the FreeDOS startup options.

Here's the boot-up sequence... Pre-BIOS screen

(I had to do a slow-motion video to capture this output as it was only on screen for a fraction of a second, hence the poor image quality)... FreeDOS's autodetection of the HDD geometry

FreeDOS loading options

I pressed F8 to turn get more info about the loading process, and did get a bit further... Entering options one-by-one in singlestepping mode

So, FreeDOS helpfully tells me the drive geometry of my SD Card. I tried plugging those number into the BIOS and now I can get as far as the 4th screenshot above. But as soon as I select "N" for the last question shown, the laptop seems to hang. No activity after several minutes.

I know very little about this era of 386 architecture, or of the low-level details of DOS-like operating systems. I feel like this system is close to loading FreeDOS fully and perhaps being a usable system.

Can anyone tell me what options I should choose? I've tried all four of the menu options (see the 3rd image above).

I'd love to get this system up and running properly as it's in excellent condition (apart from the missing drives) and even the screen and keyboard are in great shape.

Improve this question
12
  • 2
    Did you repartition and reformat the drive after changing the geometry? Is that really a 64MB SD card? Have you tried original MS-DOS or other DOS? FreeDOS is great but could still have issues.
    – Justme
    Commented Oct 21 at 13:22
  • I haven't reformatted the SD card, and it is physically a 128 MB one (the smallest one I could buy at the time!). I tried MS DOS 3.3 (which is what the system shipped with originally, according to a sticker on the back). Since I saw a chance that FreeDOS might be close to working, I wanted to see if it's just a matter of configuration before I try anything more drastic.
    – Wossname
    Commented Oct 21 at 13:31
  • The CHS parameters differ by one cylinder. So it should work up to that point. But it may need repartitioning if you touched any other CHS value. However there are many variables - modern adapter and modern OS. At least many CF adapters have issues with older machines and may cause a few exciting problems. The card may be too large to show up properly, as 128MB card is showing up as 64MB drive.
    – Justme
    Commented Oct 21 at 13:47
  • 1
    You should let the system format the card.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Oct 21 at 18:02
  • 1
    Ok, then we can rule out trouble with drivers, and it must be something more fundamental. The InitDiskWARNING comes from kernel/initdisk.c, and that likely just means that the size of the partition is off (which shouldn't cause a hang). There are DEBUG defines in the kernel, if you have some programming skills, I'd recompile the kernel with DEBUG enabled to pin down where it hangs. Potentially the FreeDos develops can also help.
    – dirkt
    Commented Oct 22 at 10:56

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .