Big trouble in little 486 DX4 \ VOGONS

Big trouble in little 486 DX4

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First post, by DECtape

Posted on 2015-09-23, 05:29

DECtape Offline

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I was recently given a lovely little 8meg ram 486 DX4 system, I wanted to get some games on it but didn't have any working floppy drives, on the advice of someone on another forum site I dropped the systems hard drive in my pentium 4 system, the system automatically booted to MS Dos on me but I exited out and returned to windows, I moved the installer for Retro city rampage 486 on it as well as streetrod se, when I put it back in the 486 system it started giving me the "No rom basic, system haulted" error, I fiddled with some settings and right now it'll give me the system spec run down it shows before it starts DOS but nothing else. For a while I could get the drive to start DOS on my pentium 4 computer but it just started telling me it needs to be formatted.

I managed to get MS DOS 6.22 installed on a floppy disk and if I do disk swapping I can run games that'll fit on a single disk like Street Rod but I want to be able to actually play games bigger than 1.44 meg, how should I go about installing it? I tried formatting the drive to FAT on my windows XP box and even copying the contents of the MS DOS floppy onto the drive on the WinXP box now I have a working floppy, but the system says "Please remove disks or othe[ media and press any key to restart". Any help would be greatly appreciated

May your frames be high and your temps be low.

Reply 1 of 11, by PhilsComputerLab

Posted on 2015-09-23, 05:42

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You need to have the MS-DOS installation disks. I believe for MS-DOS 6.22 there are 3 of them. Boot from the first disk and it will install MS-DOS.

You might want to format your drive before so that everything is clean and ready to go.

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Reply 2 of 11, by DECtape

Posted on 2015-09-23, 05:51

DECtape Offline

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Alright, where can I get/make them? also how do I go about formatting my drive? I've tried formatting it with the windows XP box to fat but the system just tried to boot then gave me the "Please remove disks" error. Should I wipe them? Maybe make a dos 6 bootable floppy then boot the xp box with it, as it has a boot manager thing, then format it from there? I haven't been able to figure out a way to change boot order from the 486 systems bios, it seems to attempt to boot from the hard drive when it's told it has one then if it can't just give up.

May your frames be high and your temps be low.

Reply 3 of 11, by Caluser2000

Posted on 2015-09-23, 06:48

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Dos images are all over the net so shouldn't be too hard to find to make a dos disk set up. But all you really need is a boot disk with a few files to format the drive. Create the set or just get a suitable boot disk from the likes of bootdisk.com. Create the disk/disk set, set the old hdd as master on the P4, disconnecting any other hdds. Install dos with the set. Alternatively use the sole boot disk to just format the drive and install the needed system files A:\> type "format c: /s" without brackets.

Reboot the system and see if it goes to the c:\>

If it does move the hdd to the 486, set the bios to the correct settings for the hdd, reboot and see if you get to the c:\>

Congrats

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 4 of 11, by DECtape

Posted on 2015-09-23, 07:09

DECtape Offline

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Sounds good, my biggest worry is that after I had the drive in the p4 DOS stopped working on the 486, i'll try doing that in the morning though.

May your frames be high and your temps be low.

Reply 5 of 11, by Caluser2000

Posted on 2015-09-23, 07:11

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DECtape wrote:
Sounds good, my biggest worry is that after I had the drive in the p4 DOS stopped working on the 486, i'll try doing that in the morning though.

Sounds like you moved some critical files. Good luck. If you've got something older than the P4 you can try that.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 6 of 11, by DECtape

Posted on 2015-09-23, 16:51

DECtape Offline

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The only thing I did while I had the drive running under windows xp was drag the installer for retro city rampage, in a folder named RCR486, to the drive as well as Street Rod SE.

May your frames be high and your temps be low.

Reply 7 of 11, by DECtape

Posted on 2015-09-24, 03:02

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After much fiddling I've determined that some is wrong with the 800meg drive and the IDE VBL card the system uses doesn't appear to support LDA, so I'm going to put this project in storage for now until I can ship a 2gb DoM from china. Untill then I've thrown DOS 6.22 on a Pentium 3 system I have, now I just need to work out how to install a soundblaster/soundblaster compatable PCI card on DOS

May your frames be high and your temps be low.

Reply 8 of 11, by oerk

Posted on 2015-09-24, 08:32

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Yeah, maybe the IDE controller doesn't support more than 504MB. Using a bigger drive can cause all kinds of problems, especially corrupted file systems, if the partition is bigger than 504MB.

You'll have to use a drive overlay tool or a controller card with BIOS if you want to use the 800MB drive or a larger DoM.

Reply 9 of 11, by matze79

Posted on 2015-09-24, 09:50

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PCI and Soundblaster isnt really combatible.

All PCI Cards need EMM386.EXE loaded and some special TSR for getting SB Combatible.
This means all Games that don't like protect mode won't run with PCI Cards.

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Reply 10 of 11, by DECtape

Posted on 2015-09-24, 17:16

DECtape Offline

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The system came with the 800meg drive

May your frames be high and your temps be low.

Reply 11 of 11, by Caluser2000

Posted on 2015-09-24, 19:00

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Without any detail about the mobo model no. it really is difficult help out.

There's a glitch in the matrix.
A founding member of the 286 appreciation society.
Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

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