ivannudem wrote on 2021-02-03, 00:37:

Hi, I bought a Futro S300 thin client and it arrived today. It has no built-in floppy, no CD-Rom, but supports USB-CDROM or USB […]
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Hi, I bought a Futro S300 thin client and it arrived today.
It has no built-in floppy, no CD-Rom, but supports USB-CDROM or USB thumb drive boot.
I wanted to install DOS6.22 and Win98 dual boot. However, I encountered another problem when I wanted to install them.
My internal HDD is a Sandisk 32GB CF card inserted into the onboard CF slot, and in Bios, it was successfully recognized as 29GB IDE device. In bios I set the IDE mode to be UDMA33 (I dunno if this will affect anything or not, it could be set to legacy PIO mode).

I made two bootable USB thumb drives by burning the bootable image from allbootdisks (https://www.allbootdisks.com/download/iso.html) to the 2 thumb drives by UltraISO burning tool. The DOS6.22 doesn't work at all, when boot sequence was selected as USB-IDE first (my thumbdrive's name) it got into a dead loop trying to boot from usb but failed etc...

When I tried to boot my WIn98SE bootable thumbdrive, it booted into the dos prompt and I could do FDISK for the 32GB internal CF card, but for all other command it always prompts (see screenshots in attachments):
Sector not found reading Drive A
Abort, Retry, Fail?
I don't even have a floppy drive (none usb floppy was attached at all)
and this error occurred periodically and I could not even type a full command, it interrupts in the middle of typing a command.

There's another headache, when attached, the USB thumb drive will always be recognized as C:, and the internal CF card on which I want to install OSes is recognized as D: ... therefore I could not set active the D:....
How can I solve this, and how can I install DOS6.22 using thumbdrive?
Thanks
Ivan

This is just my opinion, but I don't see the point in DOS 6.22 . It will limit you to a 2GB partition size and there is nothing it can dos that Windows 98SE's DOS 7.1 cannot do just as well .

My approach would be to connect the CF card via a USB adapter to a modern PC running a Windows 98 SE virtual machine , format, partition and make bootable the CF card through the Windows 98 SE VM, copy the win98 directory from the installation CD to the CF card and then boot the Futro S300 off of the CF card and install Windows SE by running setup.exe from the win98 directory .

Hi Darry,
Thanks for your suggestion.... I know that lots of games could run perfectly under Win98, but just for the nostalgia I wanted to install Dos6.22 and Win3.1...
I googled a lot and it seems that attaching the CF card to a virtual box might be the fastest way to do so...
Unfortunately my usb-CF reader is still on the way.. I now have a USB-CDROM at hand, maybe I could try to burn the bootable image on a CD/DVD and boot?

you can also install dos 6.22 and win 3.11 to a virtual machine using virtual floppys. You can create a Bootable CD in nero using a floppy image, then you mount the virtual disk you created that you installed dos and win 3.11 to the host machine as a hdd, than copy the entire contents to the CD compilation and burn that. Boot the cd and run the fdisk and format commands then copy the contents of the cd to the HDD. This is not really hard to do.

If you want to have both DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 and Windows 98 SE, for the sake of nostalgia, I understand. I would, however, recommend having them on separate CF cards .

DOS 6.22 being limited to seeing 8GB max on a CF card or hard disk, and only 2 GB on a given partition will severely compromise your Windows 98 SE experience if you can get the 2 to coexist on the same drive or CF card .

On a side note regarding Windows 98 SE's DOS 7.1 game compatibility, it is more accurate to say that you will be hard pressed to find a DOS game that works on DOS 6.22 but does not on DOS 7.1 . Backwards compatibility is pretty near perfect . See DOS 6.22 and Windows 98 SE Multi Install

Thanks for everybody's help. Just a follow-up. I purchased a Lenovo USB CD drive, some CD-RW's and burned the booting disks, but to my disappointment, it doesn't boot, I tried the disk on my desktop (much modern one dated back to 2016) the CD could boot... I suspect there was a compatibility issue with the drive?

I have to shell out another $20 to buy a CF card reader (which I don't have at all) and try to install the OSes via virtual box... hope it will work, but who knows.
The thin client just cost $35, but to install an OS onto it, the "investments" are far more expensive than the machine itself...Lol

ivannudem wrote on 2021-02-03, 02:50:

Hi Darry, Thanks for your suggestion.... I know that lots of games could run perfectly under Win98, but just for the nostalgia […]
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Hi Darry,
Thanks for your suggestion.... I know that lots of games could run perfectly under Win98, but just for the nostalgia I wanted to install Dos6.22 and Win3.1...
I googled a lot and it seems that attaching the CF card to a virtual box might be the fastest way to do so...
Unfortunately my usb-CF reader is still on the way.. I now have a USB-CDROM at hand, maybe I could try to burn the bootable image on a CD/DVD and boot?

Eeeh, you certainly picked an “interesting” machine to run DOS/Win 3.1 upon. The GPU (some SiS315 variant) seems to only have drivers starting with Windows 95/98, and the built-in audio is AC97 only...

Yeah, I regret it. I didn't do my research, just wanted to have a cheapie thing for the nostalgia. Now I paid the price and became sober...

ivannudem wrote on 2021-02-10, 16:32:

Yeah, I regret it. I didn't do my research, just wanted to have a cheapie thing for the nostalgia. Now I paid the price and became sober...

Well, it's not nearly that bad - the SiS Mirage might work using the old SiS 6326 Windows 3.1 drivers, and you can probably use a ESS Solo-1 or Yamaha YMF724 based PCI sound card. The southbridge on the Futro S300 is a Via VT8235, which should play well with PCI distributed DMA (DDMA) so DOS/ISA soundblaster pro functionality should be finewith it.

Huh, this is the first time I’ve seen a SiS GPU integrated into the same hardware with a VIA Southbridge. That’s fairly uncommon.

Either ways, gun for a CF-to-SD card adapter, and you should be able to easily pre-load DOS onto it. CF readers aren’t built into modern machines while SD/MicroSDXC readers tend to be integrated . I prefer not to buy mSATA/IDE44 adapters for thin clients unless they are meant to go into higher performance machines (S400/HP t5720s and etc)

Thanks ragefury32,
I’m quite a newbie in retro area, so I lacked so many equipments (like CD RW drives, CF card readers etc..) but I realized that I might better make the investment.
I figured out why external CD drive could not boot it, it might have something to do with the current/power that the USB port could provide: when loaded with boot CD, this guy tried hard to spin it up but failed and tried it again and again, this might be due to the degradation of the USB port power supply? Or The power is ok but there’s a driver issue, I mean the bios was not able to fully drive this External CD drive...
I brought a CF card reader and successfully installed Dos6.22,win3.1 and win98 via virtualbox raw disk access(And there comes a minor USB driver problem of my USB keyboard and mouse, I ordered the PS2-USB adapter which is still on the way...)
I will try your suggestions and do some research about the possible dos drivers for sound card and Video chips.
But to save my life, next time when I build retro, I’d rather buy a full rig with proper CD-ROM drive and floppy....)
Big thanks to every expert here.
Iván

ivannudem wrote on 2021-02-13, 17:40:

Thanks ragefury32, I’m quite a newbie in retro area, so I lacked so many equipments (like CD RW drives, CF card readers etc..) b […]
Show full quote

Thanks ragefury32,
I’m quite a newbie in retro area, so I lacked so many equipments (like CD RW drives, CF card readers etc..) but I realized that I might better make the investment.
I figured out why external CD drive could not boot it, it might have something to do with the current/power that the USB port could provide: when loaded with boot CD, this guy tried hard to spin it up but failed and tried it again and again, this might be due to the degradation of the USB port power supply? Or The power is ok but there’s a driver issue, I mean the bios was not able to fully drive this External CD drive...
I brought a CF card reader and successfully installed Dos6.22,win3.1 and win98 via virtualbox raw disk access(And there comes a minor USB driver problem of my USB keyboard and mouse, I ordered the PS2-USB adapter which is still on the way...)
I will try your suggestions and do some research about the possible dos drivers for sound card and Video chips.
But to save my life, next time when I build retro, I’d rather buy a full rig with proper CD-ROM drive and floppy....)
Big thanks to every expert here.
Iván

Well, being able to boot a external CDROM is both a hardware requirement (the BIOS must allow USB/firewire to act as a boot source) and software requirement (the software you are booting must have provisions to allow boot from there) - so even if the hardware you have can boot from CDROM, the chances of it booting Windows 95/98 off a USB CDROM drive is practically nil....and eeeh, you might need a Y-cable. Most legacy USB external CDROM drives that I know of either uses its own power brick/wall wart to drive it, or uses a Y-cable to grab power from another port. Don't forget that with normal USB it's only 5v, 500 miliamps max per port, and 2.5 Watts is not quite enough to power the USB->PATA bridge, the PATA drive electronics and the motor used to drive the optical media.

Eeeeh, thin clients do make sense for retrogaming since it takes up much less space than a full rig, and sometimes, the lack of options does help make you focus on getting maximal value out of the hardware instead of throwing money into upgrades. The one big takeaway on using thin clients for this purpose is to understand that the first mass market thin clients came out right at the tail end of the legacy PC lifecycle (around late '99 to 2000) , so most (except the first ones or some happy accidents) do not have much in terms of legacy PC compatibility.