USB and Floppy Disk Drives

Posted on 2023-06-08, 14:26

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I get floppy disks, as set up disks, with the vintage computer parts I order online. I want to try imaging the set up disks and then accessing the image with a gotek floppy disk emulator. The diskette emulator will be on a machine powered by MS-DOS (a socket 5 i586 P100 1994ish). Should I …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-07, 14:39

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I plan to replace the cache ICs. I also have CHS to the tee. It's very basic. But complicated if you take addressing for granted and assume the most good has been done for you. I really need to consult some programming references (which I have in a crate right now) on INT13h. That would have …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-06, 12:26

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello all. I found out that the problem was my external cache. Once I disabled it in BIOS my computer was able to book to MSDOS. I did eventually discover that CHS from the BIOS autodetect was accurate. The hardware had the correct range of addresses to locate the sectors it needs to boot up. Once a …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-06, 12:15

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Can't you just use a random selection from bios (aka 40-500mb) than use Ontrack overlay app to partition the disk? it worked fine on Toshiba 80286 or my 80486.... (using 4.3 gb's drive , can go up to 120gb) -overlay app works similar to vista+ ms os's , bypassing the bios drive settings & setting …

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Re: Obtaining CHS values from a PATA disk

Posted on 2023-06-06, 12:07

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks. I am seriously in need of a program like the one you mention. I am working on getting needed tools together to work with machines from the 90s. One future project (from the 1980s) might be a 286. Very interested in that type of machine because of its ability to render color graphics. Thanks …

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Obtaining CHS values from a PATA disk

Posted on 2023-06-04, 20:09

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I managed to try IDEINFO.exe but it reports that I have n0 IDE/AT drive(s). I am trying to find information similar to that of IDEINFO, which includes CHS values. My hard drives certainly are IDE/AT drives. However the interface(s) I've tried seem to be incompatible with IDEINFO. IDEINFO …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-03, 21:00

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

BIOS in 1997 should auto-detect the HDD just fine. What is your problem? HDD not booting? But is it configured? DOS installed, active partition set and so on... You should make a bootable floppy. Boot from it and see if the HDD is recognised in DOS (c:\) or via FDISK. Thanks. Yes during the time …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-03, 18:31

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Would be glad to try OnTrack. I'll work on it soon. Can't you just use a random selection from bios (aka 40-500mb) than use Ontrack overlay app to partition the disk? it worked fine on Toshiba 80286 or my 80486.... (using 4.3 gb's drive , can go up to 120gb) -overlay app works similar to vista+ ms …

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Re: Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-03, 17:39

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On the other thread I asked if you could check MSD, but let's try something else. On your hardware 486 can you run the autodetect feature in your BIOS and then show us the C/H/S values that display after autodetection, as well as which translation mode you have picked? Also, by knowing which BIOS …

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Nailing CHS for a Pre-Ultra ATA/DOS era motherboard

Posted on 2023-06-03, 04:26

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I want to thank the people here for offering me advise about building a machine with DOS 6/Win 311. I have been struggling with understanding ways to get CHS addressing working on two of my PCs. I am realizing that the problem is in configuration schemes that existed before the 1996 BIOS Boot …

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Re: I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-02, 17:29

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Can a disk image map original byte and address structure to a unpartitioned media? So will a disk image prevent a drift in CHS addressing? For example I use a disk image of a machine with DOS installed. The target machine has completely zero filled media. The image from one disk is applied to the …

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Re: I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-02, 17:13

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A BIOS needs a first sector on the disk containing the 55AA signature word as last 2 bytes so that it will try to start from it...BIOS' INT 13 routines basically are matched to a chipset. ...MS-DOS up to 6.22 do not use LBA scheme... Considering your advise, virtualbox has a virtual PIIX3 chipset. …

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Re: I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-02, 16:55

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On your 486 if you go under MSD and then (D)isk Drives, and give us the information under C: (C/H/S values according to FDPT as well as CMOS) it might help in explaining exactly how your bios is doing it. I think about bytes and hexadecimal numbers when reading your message. Is there some viewer …

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I'm asking about INT13h again.

Posted on 2023-06-01, 17:52

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I found out just now that the programming for accessing the disk using INT13h looks like assembly code. I don't understand the topic and I wonder if anyone knows of a way to help me understand something about addressing. Given a VM with MSDOS 6 instantiated; Does the virtual BIOS & PATA …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-29, 00:24

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thank you. This was invaluable. Threw away all the disks I made that were later or earlier than version 5. Will be spared the (always) long search to get the repos working. Thanks.

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-27, 19:57

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

dd is dd is dd, whether you use it from a 1996 Slackware install, a SunOS version or something from a modern Ubuntu. What is the purpose of comparing bytes? If you want to just compare a byte range to another byte range you can extract using DD from one offset and then use diff (with the binary …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-27, 19:04

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You can also use a one-floppy Linux distro for the purpose, or a multi floppies rescue system, like the slackware boot and root/rescue disks: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=690820#p690820 Yes the floppy is a great idea. I was just coming here to ask about weather or not I should use a full …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-26, 20:06

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used a similar technique several times to clone a disk from a retro system. But I booted a lightweight Linux instead (from cd). CF will work too. You can DD to a file, but also through the network (using netcat) And md5sum is used to check that the saved image is identical to the physical disk. …

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Re: Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-26, 20:02

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks. I am using a ESA TF486 baby AT, has post DOS features such as Plug'n Play. I have no OS installed. Using a Samsung Voyager 2 3.4 GB HDD from 1997 and a Promise U33 PCI with an option ROM to over come the defunct INT13h from Phoenix BIOS. A virtual machine disk with DOS installed is ascribed …

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Debian Live - recovery by image on early 90s PCs

Posted on 2023-05-26, 18:22

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by serialShinobi

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello. I am wondering about using the dd command from early Debian and the file utilities package. My goal is to make a bootable debian live CF card. If that happens I'll likely configure networking and configure the package manager. Then locate the package containing the dd command. I read some …

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