First post, by darvil
Hello! First time here. Of course my first post will be about an issue... How creative!
I will be honest, I'm a quite young-ish user here (in my twenties!) and I must admit my knowledge about old hardware is limited, however, I really do and want to do my best at keeping old things functioning, even if it involves learning many new things. Over the years I have developed so much love for previous technology, and seeing it "replaced" or forgotten makes me sad!
The reason I'm writing this is because of the issue I'm experiencing. Prior to telling you about it, I do have a feeling its a pretty basic thing that should be obvious for most people...
Anyway!;
I have an IBM PS/2 model 30-286. It does work surprisingly well. The hard drive (30mb) works well and boots into MS-DOS 5.0. There's some software and files in it, which I plan to backup as soon as possible.
The floppy drive had issues loading any diskette. I read these units are notorious for having faulty drives, so I did replace the faulty capacitors and it now works quite well. It is able to boot the starter and diagnostics diskettes flawlessly, is able to read the contents in them and so on. Here you have some photos of it!
But here's the issue:
Other than the disks I wrote (Starter and Diagnostics disk), I also got ready one with PKZIP and PC-DOS (so that i can easily backup all the data with pkzip, and then install pc-dos). I used rawwrite to write the images on then. These are 1.44MB, high density disks, which are in fact supported by this computer.
When attempting to load them on the IBM, I got an interesting issue. When trying to run the executables, nothing would happen or the computer would hang, which made me think something was going really bad. Decided to take a look at the contents of the text files in the directories (such as READMEs and so) and I noticed the contents were all shifted! That is, files had contents of another file at the start, so executables and binaries in general were definitely very cooked! I initially thought this could be caused by misalignment of the heads, but the fact that it boots the starter diskettes fine makes me believe that can't be it...
After this, I decided to format them again, but this time, instead of writing the image disks on them, I opened the image files and copied the contents manually. I figured that would work since these dont really require me to make them bootable.
The result? The executables seem to run, but I do get a Sector not found reading drive A error after hearing the drive head knocking a few times.
After this, I decided to try to get the starter disk in while MS-DOS was running to see if it had the same issue, and indeed does. After all of this, I can see that running the programs from boot works perfectly fine, but in ms-dos, everything seems to break...
I really would appreciate some guidance now as I really I'm not sure what's exactly happening. I could be doing something very wrong and I'm not aware either!
Thank you in advance!
