Try the EZ drive overlay software. It works much better than Ontrack in my opinion. Seems to be more compatible. Uses standard partion types.

http://vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=19

Thanks for the reply will try EZ tomorrow.

One point to add is the 386 laptop floppy is not working so I am trying to add the drive overlay using a Pentium 4 system. Could it be the drive overlay software is checking the P4 bios and thinking an overlay is not required with an 1GB or 2GB drive and not installing one?

I need somehow to force the overlay to install. Anyhow will try EZ post my results.

Pioneer386 wrote on 2023-02-08, 02:26:

Could it be the drive overlay software is checking the P4 bios and thinking an overlay is not required with an 1GB or 2GB drive and not installing one?

Yes that could very much be the case. EZ-Drive has the option to forcefully install it, I'm not sure if it exists in all versions though. If yours doesn't have it just try a different version.

Other options are SCSI with its own BIOS or XTIDE (especially if you need a network card anyway).

Deunan wrote on 2023-02-08, 12:55:

Other options are SCSI with its own BIOS or XTIDE (especially if you need a network card anyway).

Might be difficult to do those things on a laptop

douglar wrote on 2023-02-08, 15:08:

(...) laptop

Missed that part 😀 I did wonder why nobody suggested XTIDE but figured it was because a software solution was proposed instead.

Pioneer386 wrote on 2023-02-08, 02:26:

One point to add is the 386 laptop floppy is not working so I am trying to add the drive overlay using a Pentium 4 system. Could it be the drive overlay software is checking the P4 bios and thinking an overlay is not required with an 1GB or 2GB drive and not installing one?

I think I remember your story in the past. I have had good luck moving EZ-drive equipped storage between computers. Let me know how it goes for you. I hope it works out.

You can use SSTOR to Setup your disk.
It will set BIOS CHS in CMOS RAM.

I use it on NCR PC 286 which only supports a few "Fixed" types.

https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/software/Sto … s/speedstor.htm

Thanks to all who replied, great suggestions.

I did get a 1GB CF card working with the 386 laptop today. On the P4 where I was attempting to prepare the CF card, I changed the HD bios settings. I turned off LBA auto mode and used manual mode instead with CHS config values from the 386. Then Seagate Discwizard Ontrack software detected the bios settings were not ideal but asked if I wanted to continue and it installed the overlay. Then I moved the CF card to the 386 laptop and selected the preset CHS I used above and installed DOS 6.22. It sees the full 1GB.

I will look at SpeedStor and EZ-drive as well, the SCSI suggestion for a 386 would have been great too but can’t think of a way to get a SCSI controller on the laptop.

Looking forward to installing Windows 3.1 and software on the now silent 386.

I apologize for necroing this thread, but thought this might help someone searching for this specific laptop, as there is not a ton of info out there.

I also have a Dell 320N 386 laptop and decided to go the SD card w/adapter route and use EZ Drive.

I initially tried EZ Drive 9.03w, but that would crash the whole program when I tried the fully automatic install. I found a thread that someone said 9.06w worked on their 386. So I tried that version and the automatic install choice now would succeed. It does have an error at the end but I did not seem worse off by ignoring it.

The steps that worked for me to install DOS 6.22:
1. Plug in the SD card adapter with the SD card inserted
2. Boot into the laptop BIOS (for this laptop is kind of tricky, I hit F1 and delete a couple times and it will say a key is stuck, then give me the option to hit F2 to go into the BIOS)
3. Once in the BIOS, set the hard disk to Type 9 of the fixed type choices, then hit escape to exit and save (saw this part on a Philscomputerlab YouTube video)
4. Boot the laptop in a way that you can run EZ Drive 9.06w, and run it
5. It should now show the drive under Identified Drives
6. Choose Fully Automatic Install to install the EZ Drive bios
7. Reboot with no disks in the floppy drive (if you now try to install DOS by booting directly from the floppy, it will fail at the very end on COMMAND.COM)
8. EZ BIOS should start up, and you will see yellow text asking you two options. Choose: Type A to begin OS installation
9. Insert the DOS disk #1 to begin installing DOS
10. The DOS install should complete successfully
11. Upon rebooting with no floppies in the drive, it should boot DOS directly from the SD card