devius wrote on 2020-12-26, 22:31:

So I recently installed Windows 98 SE on a Toshiba Satellite 2550CDT and I have no cursor if booting directly into DOS.

Put a "Prompt $P$G" line in top of autoexec.bat and it should give a full cursor in DOS. DOS does not always return to full cursor when certain device drivers are loaded.
So you may have to to put it near the end of Autoexec after all devices are loaded... added: I see you are loading a ESS executable in Autoexec which could be the cause in DOS.
That should put: Current drive and path + > (greater-than sign) + _ (flashing underscore) as in C:\DOS>_ back as default
edit: missed a thing and bad grammar 😀

Thanks Horun. Unfortunately that didn’t help. I had also ruled out the possibility of the problem being caused by some TSR or driver.

Some more observations that may be useful:
- There is also no cursor on edit.com
- If I have a mouse driver loaded I can see the mouse cursor in edit.com but there is still no text input cursor

I’m starting to suspect this is some kind of hardware issue, possibly related to the graphics card. I’ll dig up all the drivers I can find for this PC to see if there is anything related to this.

On some systems running real DOS, like those using CGA graphiks,
the cursor blink is handled by the hardware (Motorola CRTC in case of CGA)..
Maybe it's similar with your laptop.
- The cursor in the DOS window, by contrast, is controlled by Windows, I think.

Yeah, I suspect it’s something like that. The only thing I found that could offer some more clues is a companion disk for Toshiba laptops but I currently don’t have any 1,44MB floppies with me to create it so can’t try it now.

In the mean time I updated the BIOS from the original 7.10 to 8.20 but that made no difference to the cursor.

The "Prompt $P$G" is inserted last in autoexec.bat. I always have this in all of the DOS boxens that I had.

Cheers,