Now, SURELY you're not still also loading the CD-ROM device driver in CONFIG.SYS (and a redirector like MSCDEX.EXE in AUTOEXEC.BAT), right? It seems like that's not a mistake you would make, from reading your posts in this thread. Do the hard disk controllers in the Device Manager have the (!) on …

W00t! I'm a winner! Thanks for these neat giveaways, it's really cool seeing things going out to people instead of just ending up in a landfill or whatever.

It wouldn't be Thoughtware's Jingle Disk, would it?

I've added the MaxPhysPage line to system.ini to get around the excessive ram, could this have caused it? The system only has 512MB installed at the moment anyway, however without the line Windows fails to boot saying "not enough memory" You might have better luck with the "MaxFileCache" setting in …

I had an M-321 board whose cache was real, but the tag ram was soldered on instead of socketed, so to upgrade from 128KB to 256KB would have required soldering in a different SDRAM chip. I never attempted that. Also, the system would lock up or reboot when using any of the 16-bit DMA channels, so …

infiniteclouds wrote: I don't understand -- how is real DOS being run on these modern CPUs like i7s? Virtual machines? I can't find anything on this site or youtube with regards to this. Those modern CPUs still support the original 8086 instruction set.

looking here i find the install disk has a file called MTMCDS.SYS maybe thats whats used to access the IDE port on the AWE32? MTMCDS.SYS is for Mitsumi CD-ROM drives using the proprietary Mitsumi interface, which, while 40-pin is not IDE. SBIDE.SYS is for IDE CD-ROM drives on any IDE controller. An …

There's no A record for motherboards.mbarron.net, so probably it's just GONE gone instead of just a temporary outage. Thankfully there's still stason.org...

I've had some luck with using a very strong magnet (like a hard drive magnet) to quickly bulk erase a floppy before trying to do the unconditional format. It's worked a few times after the original attempts to format a floppy have failed. However, if the surface actually has damage, it's not likely …

They are, yes. You can't blame me for asking :) I have since given up on this board though since it began freezing entirely after posting no matter what I'm trying to boot from. I managed to find another (better) board since after so many different issues on this one, it was deemed unworthy of …

Looks like the tag SRAMs are fine, but you only mention J12. Are JP8-11 open?