did you do a copy or install? dos expects to know a hard location of its files for booting.

you can try, boot floppy disk, from A: drive run a "sys c:" to make the system files transfer to C: to make it bootable.

also run fdisk and make sure C: has its bootable flag set.

I did an install.

As for "sys C:" I get the message "system transfered" but still get the message that the OS isn't to be found.

fdisk's bootable flag is is the active drive right?

relo999 wrote:

I did an install.

As for "sys C:" I get the message "system transfered" but still get the message that the OS isn't to be found.

fdisk's bootable flag is is the active drive right?

Are you using an actual hard drive or a flash card? How big is the drive/card?

maybe fdisk /mbr if the mbr has issues?

I use a compact flash card, it's 8GB.

fdisk /mbr fixed it somewhat. On the full speed it freezes after HIMEM test. But on the Turbo speed (low speed), it boots into MS-DOS "fine". With fine I mean it work but get's a load of errors on start up. something about XMS driver not being installed and HMA not being available. The whole error message here: http://imgur.com/gallery/EKbE8

Something obstructing HIMEM.SYS - load other drivers after it in CONFIG.SYS. The other problem sounds like an unstable system, probaby directly related to the misconfigured CPU and memory.

Removed the 30pin simms and left the 72 pin now it doesn't give an error only giving after the himem test on normal speed "C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X" before giving the C: prompt. So all seems fine now.

It now only get's those errors when the RAM isn't recognized. So that's the next issue to solve... (As for the CPU, my suspicion is that it actually works fine but simply doesn't get the DX4 marker and instead gets the DX2 as next to that it seems to be completely fine)

The motherboard probably only works correctly with certain combinations of 30 pin and 72 pin SIMMs (also, similar memory types)

Yea figured as much, tried replacing my 16 mb simms(72) with my 4mb ones (also 72 pin) and now it reads that correctly all the 7 times I've tried. So if these don't start acting up soon I can say the RAM not reading correctly and inconsistently is the fault of those simms.

So apart from the CPU not being read as a DX4 and the floppy drive error everything seems to be solved.

relo999 wrote:

Yea figured as much, tried replacing my 16 mb simms(72) with my 4mb ones (also 72 pin) and now it reads that correctly all the 7 times I've tried. So if these don't start acting up soon I can say the RAM not reading correctly and inconsistently is the fault of those simms.

So apart from the CPU not being read as a DX4 and the floppy drive error everything seems to be solved.

CPU not being read by a DX4 might be incorrect jumpers.