Kyodai wrote:

weird "Rawrite" format floppy images

I thought that was a fairly standard format. Why not try Rawritewin ?
http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite

Big caveat here is that they are 360 5.25 Inch floppy images and need to be created on these.

You might be able to format ordinary high-density 5.25" floppies as 360k. It's worth a try.

- Create a DOS bootable C image. 70 MB and boots DOS 6.22 - Copy DOS files and the xenix disk maker there - Create a 360K Floppy […]
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- Create a DOS bootable C image. 70 MB and boots DOS 6.22
- Copy DOS files and the xenix disk maker there
- Create a 360K Floppy image with BFI (http://www.nu2.nu/bfi/)
- Boot from my C: drive and format the 360K floppy image
- Reboot and try to write the N1 boot disk image using rawrite

You completely lost me here.

Well my main problem is that I don't really have a 5.25" Floppy drive. I might have one in the basement but not sure if i can patch up a machine that is so old it could utilize this thing.

The main idea was that DOSBOX (at least in theory) supports 360K FLoppy images and while the image seems to work as it should in DOSBOX, writing to it with rawrite somehow doesn't yield anything good.

I already looked at rawritewin but i also only supports writing to physical floppies and as I don't really have any 5.25 Inch floppy drive ready it makes limited sense. In DOSBOX - as the name suggests - i run DOS not windows, but if someone was like "It only work in windows, DOS ver is broken is DOSBOX" i might go through the pain of installing win95 or so in DOSBOX. Maybe worth a shot, maybe not.

I'm simply unsure why it ain't working. I think in theory it should work, but it simply doesn't.

Do you have any reason to expect this to work at all? I note that the Wikipedia article says that special drivers are needed to get it to boot MINIX.

Anyway, is the idea just to get the files out of the images? Because like I said, "rawrite" is a standard format. You can use Winimage (shareware), Disk Explorer, or Virtual Floppy Drive to copy the files off and into a new image; you can even use the IMGMOUNT command in DOSBox to mount them directly. The principal difficulty (and I don't think it would be solved by whatever it is you are proposing) would be extracting the boot sector.

Perhaps you could explain more clearly just what you are trying to do.

Well as all good retro projects it is more like fooling around and trying stuff maybe noone tried before. I thought it might be cool to have a "Microsoft Unix" running on that machine, pure bragging reasons.

Anyways - the 360K floppy images are a bitch. No tool i found can read or convert them, with one exception - "Virtual Floppy drive" from sourceforge can properly mount my 360K images acting like a "real physical drive" in my PC. SO in the end i mounted the images with that and configured Oracle VirtualBox to use my existing physical drive (Which in reality is virtual) and boot from that. Works. Still loads of work ahead. Maybe it won't run. But i guess there is only one way to find out...

Thanks for your thoughts and input here.

On a sidenote - the rawrite images (at least the 360K ones) do NOT work in winimage and DOSBOX is just like "lol, wtf?" about them.

And Minix works on the HP 200LX, only a specialized version and it's a little bit slow and buggy, but somehow it works. Good enough for bragging, gonna make a video soon.

Aight, While i get to the first initial screen it crashes Oracle Virtual box after pressing enter to install. Imma try other stuff like DOSBOX, VMWare or MS Virtual PC until i find something that works 🤣

It's possible that the images do not use the standard FAT12 format, in which case the only way you might get something to understand the contents is indeed to boot from them. You can do that in DOSBox with the BOOT command, though whether Xenix will be able to do anything in the limited DOSBox environment is highly questionable – you might want to try Bochs or PCem, both of which I think should be able to support using the images directly.

I still have no clue how you think getting these disks to boot in a virtual machine is going to get them on to your HP 200LX. (What is this "N1 boot disk image" ?!)

I don't know so much about floppy formats, but it is standard - well in a way that you can call an ancient format like 5.25 inch 360K as a raw image a standard i guess.

The good news - Microsoft Virtual PC can amazingly directly open 360K Rawrite images, the bad news is that i crashes on disk 2 with a "Hdd not accessible" error.

I just need to experiment a bit more and try out some other virtualization options and combinations.

The HP 200LX can boot from a standard Compact Flash card in a PCMCIA adapter, so there's quite some stunts you can pull. Like using the CF card as the "physical drive" in VMWare instead of a virtual one and such stuff. Makes you able to install some stuff on it like it's a normal harddisk. As i know my luck it's prolly gonna end up with bitching about the 200LX's HDD being "drive A:" (Or FDD 0?) instead of a "proper HD". With windows 3.0 i could simply edit the paths from "C:\" to "A:\" and in the end it ran perfectly. Not sure if you can pull such stunts with Xenix, but would be cool if it was possible.

And thanks so much again for your valuable input, really welcome. I will give Bochs and PCem a try if the stuff i got on my HDD all fails. "Never giving up" is what makes wonders and cool stuff happen.

Oh btw - "N1" is the "boot disk" of the Xenix 2.3.1 disk set, e.g. the first disk you need to insert and boot from if you intend to install it. No idea what the "N" stands for, maybe "New system"? But i can only guess here.

FYI, WinImage is the most common windows based Rawrite capable program... the image files it writes ARE rawrite format, and it will even let you see what's inside them!
VMware also uses rawrite images and writes in that format, but it must use a file extension of .flp

For weird old OS's, DO NOT USE VirtualBox or VMware... yes, I know there's plenty of fans for either one of those brands and the debate over them is like religion
but the fact is, they do not fully emulate all PC BIOS calls, Virtual PC does... I know this because I was reading up on how to virtualize OS/2, and it is the only thing that still works/exists today that can do it

Winimage won't accept 360K rawrite images, tried that. But VMWare actually also loads them. AT least VMWare workstation 6 didnt care about the extension. VMWare, VirtualBox and Virtual PC so far all failed. VirtualBox with crashing the whole application and VirtualPC/VMWare both when the installer seeks for the HDD. I guess it was made for "pre IDE" HDDs only? For DOSBOX - it simply doesn't accept booting from the disk, i guess it doesn't like the format or so. I have mounted the emulated drive B: in DOSBOX and tried to boot from it - simply won't happen.

Update: PCE to the rescue!

I know - not as 1337 as DOSBOX but finally an emulator that "perfectly" emulates an original IBM 5160.

See Xenix 2.1.3 run flawlessly:

http://www.hampa.ch/pub/pce/pre/pce-20120404- … -xt-xenix86.zip

Well now to get it onto the HP 200LX, but that should be the easiest part.

good find!
have you tried older versions of virtualpc too? as newer versions of anything, support for old stuff gets removed 😉

Kyodai wrote:

finally an emulator that "perfectly" emulates an original IBM 5160.

I think MESS may also work for this. mess.exe ibm5160.

Not sure if it supports the disk format tho, you may have to convert it.

Thought you might like this:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=465

WHile the OS2museum trick works for 1.2 MB (And maybe 720K???) floppies it however fails for 360K ones.

Anyways - i got Xenix up and running, just cant get it to work on the HP 200LX.
I think the problem is that the HP doesn't do a real boot from PCMCIA cards. While it properly uses autoexec.bat and config.sys for use in its inbuilt MS-DOS 5 it refuses to do a real boot. And boot.com (The MS-DOS Minix bootstrapper) won't work with anything that is not minix it seems, even though the menu says "Boot Minix or OTHER OS"...

I'd like to give it a try on my Sharp PC-3100 but I don't have an SRAM card big enough for the image.

Still thanks again to everyone for your helpful comments!

Stiletto wrote:

Thought you might like this:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/?p=465

🤣 how sad... if it was vmware, you could EASILY go into the guest bios and change the floppy drive type! that just proves my point why I keep saying virtualbox is a bitch to configure/change stuff

but I still won't be surprised if vmware CAN'T run xenix though... who knows? it needs to be tried!

I think it can run Xenix 3.x fine or the 2.x versions for 286/386. The 8086 2.x version is a bitch to setup though. The installation of 2.X for 8086 fails in VMware when it checks the harddisk type, it seems to be quite reliant on these old IBM 5160 type controllers i guess.