First post, by Binraider666
Hi all,
Firstly - loving this website, loving dosbox and having much fun so far!
Secondly, onto my question...
I have a lovely old PC-chips motherboard clone (the one which had the fake cache) and a AMD 486 / 120MHZ on it, 32MB ram, and a few other bits and bobs... Having invested a couple of quid on ebay on IDE to SD and IDE to CF adapters instead of using ancient hard drives I was hoping to be able to salvage this old PC.
However, I've had no joy at all with the CF card. The IDE-SD adapter on the other hand, I do at least get as far as being able to FDISK and format the drive. Unfortunately, after installing DOS (I know my old floppies are OK, because they boot to DOS just fine from FDD, and have been recently on other PC's. Including a 2.6GHz Athlon!), the machine has a tendency to hang either at the "Starting MS-DOS" prompt, or if I'm lucky and get as far as a command prompt at all, virtually any file copied onto the drive is corrupt. It's fine if I plug a regular hard drive in instead.
I've heard somewhere that these IDE-SD adapters might not work properly without at least an ATA66 adapter or better - unfortunately I have no (immediate) way to test as my current PC has no IDE ports at all!
Other suggetsions I've had, have been running tools like dd in linux to totally blank the card (and any flags that it might have associated with being removable along with it) to convince the OS it can boot from it, or using RMSysprep (think that one's on Hiren's boot CD somewhere). I got the same results as described above using either method to set up the drive.
Does anyone have any real experience of trying this out, any suggestions on how this might be made to work?? (DOSBox is fab, but sometimes only the real hardware will do!)