Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on Yesterday, 21:00

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

BIOS in 1997 should auto-detect the HDD just fine. What is your problem? HDD not booting? But is it configured? DOS installed, active partition set and so on... You should make a bootable floppy. Boot from it and see if the HDD is recognised in DOS (c:\) or via FDISK. Thanks. Yes during the time …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on Yesterday, 18:31

by

by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Would be glad to try OnTrack. I'll work on it soon. Can't you just use a random selection from bios (aka 40-500mb) than use Ontrack overlay app to partition the disk? it worked fine on Toshiba 80286 or my 80486.... (using 4.3 gb's drive , can go up to 120gb) -overlay app works similar to vista+ ms …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on Yesterday, 17:39

by

by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On the other thread I asked if you could check MSD, but let's try something else. On your hardware 486 can you run the autodetect feature in your BIOS and then show us the C/H/S values that display after autodetection, as well as which translation mode you have picked? Also, by knowing which BIOS …

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Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on Yesterday, 04:26

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I want to thank the people here for offering me advise about building a machine with DOS 6/Win 311. I have been struggling with understanding ways to get CHS addressing working on two of my PCs. I am realizing that the problem is in configuration schemes that existed before the 1996 BIOS Boot …

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Re: I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-02, 17:29

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Can a disk image map original byte and address structure to a unpartitioned media? So will a disk image prevent a drift in CHS addressing? For example I use a disk image of a machine with DOS installed. The target machine has completely zero filled media. The image from one disk is applied to the …

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Re: I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-02, 17:13

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A BIOS needs a first sector on the disk containing the 55AA signature word as last 2 bytes so that it will try to start from it...BIOS' INT 13 routines basically are matched to a chipset. ...MS-DOS up to 6.22 do not use LBA scheme... Considering your advise, virtualbox has a virtual PIIX3 chipset. …

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Re: I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-02, 16:55

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On your 486 if you go under MSD and then (D)isk Drives, and give us the information under C: (C/H/S values according to FDPT as well as CMOS) it might help in explaining exactly how your bios is doing it. I think about bytes and hexadecimal numbers when reading your message. Is there some viewer …

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I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-01, 17:52

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I found out just now that the programming for accessing the disk using INT13h looks like assembly code. I don't understand the topic and I wonder if anyone knows of a way to help me understand something about addressing. Given a VM with MSDOS 6 instantiated; Does the virtual BIOS & PATA …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-29, 00:24

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thank you. This was invaluable. Threw away all the disks I made that were later or earlier than version 5. Will be spared the (always) long search to get the repos working. Thanks.

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-27, 19:57

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

dd is dd is dd, whether you use it from a 1996 Slackware install, a SunOS version or something from a modern Ubuntu. What is the purpose of comparing bytes? If you want to just compare a byte range to another byte range you can extract using DD from one offset and then use diff (with the binary …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-27, 19:04

by

by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You can also use a one-floppy Linux distro for the purpose, or a multi floppies rescue system, like the slackware boot and root/rescue disks: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=690820#p690820 Yes the floppy is a great idea. I was just coming here to ask about weather or not I should use a full …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-26, 20:06

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used a similar technique several times to clone a disk from a retro system. But I booted a lightweight Linux instead (from cd). CF will work too. You can DD to a file, but also through the network (using netcat) And md5sum is used to check that the saved image is identical to the physical disk. …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-26, 20:02

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks. I am using a ESA TF486 baby AT, has post DOS features such as Plug'n Play. I have no OS installed. Using a Samsung Voyager 2 3.4 GB HDD from 1997 and a Promise U33 PCI with an option ROM to over come the defunct INT13h from Phoenix BIOS. A virtual machine disk with DOS installed is ascribed …

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Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-26, 18:22

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I am wondering about using the dd command from early Debian and the file utilities package. My goal is to make a bootable debian live CF card. If that happens I'll likely configure networking and configure the package manager. Then locate the package containing the dd command. I read some …

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Re: Real mode boot to DOS 6.22 & BIOS INT13h

Posted on 2023-05-10, 17:49

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

MS-DOS 7 and onward are LBA-aware So MS-DOS 6.0 didn't just use BIOS for an addressing scheme? But in v7.0 the software developers went with the newer addressing that would permit hard disks larger than 512MB? Did someone have to give up CHS so they could have LBA? And so BIOS vendors got sketchy …

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Re: Real mode boot to DOS 6.22 & BIOS INT13h

Posted on 2023-05-10, 16:57

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

your problem is using VM's to setup a CF image that done via LBA when the motherboard is using CHS. Yes, so is DOS pre-LBA? Wasn't there a time just prior to 1995 where LBA was supported by DOS if the support was in BIOS? So do could use an LBA disk if BIOS was LBA aware. I am very interested in …

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Re: Real mode boot to DOS 6.22 & BIOS INT13h

Posted on 2023-05-10, 16:11

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. Thanks for the info you shared. I will be trying XTIDE soon. Very important for someone to use if building an old DOS era machine. For anyone interested I found a good video: "How to flash XT IDE BIOS and use it with your network adapter." https://youtu.be/5NRHMTGXd94 So my problem is not …

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Real mode boot to DOS 6.22 & BIOS INT13h

Posted on 2023-05-06, 15:41

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I have, after several months, installed DOS 6.22 on a motherboard with a 486 chipset and Plug'n Play BIOS. Thanks for advice I have been given by this forum. Now I need help getting my facts in order. I have done some reading but I wonder about the opinions of those here with more experience …

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Ontrack Disk Manager

Posted on 2023-04-30, 14:59

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I would like to know more about Ontrack Disk Manager. I know there are several versions. I am interested in this program because I recently discovered that there was once a time in PC history when hard drives came bundled with OEM versions of Ontrack Disk Manager. If you moved a hard drive from one …

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Re: Question about NetBIOS over TCP/IP Under WIN95

Posted on 2023-04-06, 13:13

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks. After using netstat I noticed the corresponding ports were open and this was true on both Win95 and Win11 machines. Then I tried nbtstat -A 192.168.x.x and could see computer name, user, and name of network on the Win95 machine. That's when I realized the two nodes were communicating over …

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