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PC104 not starting after changing DOC

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First post, by popcalent

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Hi, all.

I have a TW6052 386-SX @40 PC104 board that originally came with a 8MB Disk on Chip (DOC). I started with a boot disk, formatted the DOC, and transfer the system so I could boot from the DOC (which is unit C:). No problem at all.

I recently bought a 96MB DOC, put it on the board instead of the 8MB DOC and booted from the floppy drive with the idea of formatting it and transferring the system. The PC104 gets stuck right after showing the system information and right before starting MSDOS (see picture) and there's nothing I can do.

If I put back the 8MB DOC everything works fine again. If I start from a floppy without any DOC on the board everything works fine (but there's no DOC, obviously). Also, I bought two identical 96MB DOCs and the problem happens with both.

I don't see anything on the BIOS to tell the PC104 I changed the DOC (only IDE hard disks which I don't have), but even if the DOC was defective, I don't understand why I can't boot from the floppy disk... If the DOC was defective I should be able to start the PC104 from the floppy disk and simply be unable to access the DOC, correct?

Any ideas of what's going on? Thanks!

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Reply 1 of 2, by popcalent

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I'm bringing this old post back because I recently bought a new DOC and a similar problem is happening.

My PC104 works great with the 8MB DOC it came with, I bought two 96MB DOC and the PC104 refused to boot with either of them. Now, I bought a 64MB DOC that is the same brand as the original 8MB DOC, the PC104 boots, but MSDOS doesn't see the DOC. I can't format it, and fsdisk doesn't see it. According to the manual, the PC104 supports DOCs of up to 128MB.

I suspect the DOC needs some firmware that tells it to behave as an MSDOS drive. But I literally found zero information on the Internet. Any help? Thanks.

Reply 2 of 2, by kmeaw

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Can you see the DOC by using tools such as DINFO and DFORMAT? You can get those tools from Advantech, search for "DiskOnChip utility" in the support section.

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