VOGONS


First post, by cgyed.cgyed

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Hello,

I bought a Satellite 430cdt that works well with its IDE DD with W95.

I try to set up an MS-DOS 6.22 configuration with a IDE to CF adaptor, and a transcend 266x 2GB CF. I fully erased the CF (diskpart / clean all) and I installed MS-DOS with virtualbox. Under virtualbox, MS DOS starts and runs well.
With the real hardware, It does not work at all. I mean, the computer is not bootiong at all (the screen remains black) when I set the CF+adaptor in the computer. If I set the slave mode, the computer is booting without detecting the CF HDD and is asking for bootable media.

I found on the forum a similar problem : 486 and CF/IDE cant boot
It seems that the CHS parameters has to be changed, for example : 1023/16/63 (current parameters are : 3949/16/63). The post does not really describe how this has been done (with bios ? VMWARE ?) and the video tutorial (link on page 2) is not available anymore.

If anyone have some additional information about CHS parameters it would probably really helps.

Thanks.

Reply 1 of 7, by cgyed.cgyed

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Hello,

I tryes in the VMWARE bios to change the configuration of the compact flash drive to C=1023 / H=16 / S=63.
I then re-installed dos from wirtual floppy disk. DOS detects a 500MB hard drive (my CF if 2GB) thats fits with the new CHS parameters.
Unfortunately, this does not work.

The explaination may be : the bios cannot handle my CF (transcend 266x 2GB, not industrial) or the adaptator (new) is broken.
I'll probably try to repair the floppy disk and install dos on the normal hard drive than trying to install dos from a virtual machine with CF...

Thanks.

Reply 4 of 7, by janih

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I've installed cf cards with adapters to Toshiba Libretto 100ct & 110ct. Those laptops are similar age and spec to your 430cdt. I used just standard cf cards and adapters from ebay.

First I tried to init the cf card on my modern Linux desktop and I think I did correct things with drive format(fat32), partitioning, mbr stuff etc but it still didn't boot. So with a bootable dos disk I partitioned and formatted the cf card on my Libretto and transferred system files. After I was sure it would boot I took the card to my modern machine and transferred win98 installation and other files and then put the card back to Libretto and would start windows installation. A bit tedious but got it working that way.

Also, for my other Libretto I cloned the original spinning drive with dd and then wrote that image back to new cf card. That worked right away. If you have a working disk image this might be a easy solution.

My suggestion: remove any partitions that you've made with Virtualbox and insert that blank cf card to your 430cdt and partition and format it there. I hope you get your floppy drive fixed 😀

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Reply 6 of 7, by cgyed.cgyed

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Ok, thanks.

I forgot to mentionned that my CMOS battery is out. It is not a problem to boot with the IDE hard drive.
Could it be related to my problem ? (The laptop don't boot at all while de compact flash drive is plugged)

Concerning the SD to IDE adapter, do you think the OS installation with virtualbox and without floppy drive may be possible ? (only mentionned with CF card...)

Otherwise, I opened my floppy disk. The belt is broken. Plugged (and closed), there is a continuous motor noise, I'm not sure if it is the R/W head motor or the disc motor.

Reply 7 of 7, by janih

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cgyed.cgyed wrote on 2022-06-28, 15:44:

I forgot to mentionned that my CMOS battery is out. It is not a problem to boot with the IDE hard drive.
Could it be related to my problem ? (The laptop don't boot at all while de compact flash drive is plugged)

Concerning the SD to IDE adapter, do you think the OS installation with virtualbox and without floppy drive may be possible ? (only mentionned with CF card...)

CMOS battery should not matter. If the main battery is present the laptop should retain bios values. If you are using Windows, maybe you could try rufus to create a bootable CF card with dos?