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#143 compaq portable III (286) does not boot freedos
Newly restored Compaq Portable III (286/12Mhz/640k/287/1.44Fl/41MBhd (original disk)): Works fine with MSDOS6.xx, FreeDos does no boot. The screen says
FreeDos123
That's it.
Any hints? BTW _ the floppy image boots fine on VirtualBox and seems OK.
h
What floppy image are you referring to? You mean fdboot.img from here?
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img
You could also try other (mostly older) .img files in the hopes that something works for you. I don't anticipate any major bugs with any of it, but I don't know exactly with what or why you're having this problem. (Another naive suggestion would be to use another, presumably fresher, physical floppy disk.)
1). http://odin.fdos.org/
2). http://jorisvr.nl/freedos.html
3). http://www.finnix.org/Balder
4). https://sites.google.com/site/rugxulo/BARE_DOS.ZIP?attredirects=0
5). https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/
One of those is bound to work okay for you. If not, get on the mailing list (with more precise info).
P.S. What tool are you using to write the .img to floppy?
Thanks Anthony,
yes - it is the fdboot.img image I have been trying.
And yes, the ODIN image (1.44) works. Interesting.
BTW - dd is my tool for creating diskettes.
It seems the old (and possibly newer) Compaqs have BIOS compatibility issues.
HS
Did you try with the FreeDOS 1.2 RC1 floppy image?
Hello? Is the original reporter still there? Curious to see if this system worked with FreeDOS 1.2 RC1, as suggested on 2016-11-05
I'm here,
I'll give it a run over the weekend.
H
Related
Bugs: #143
Thanks! Best to try with FreeDOS 1.2 boot floppy (instead of FreeDOS 1.2 RC1)
https://www.freedos.org/download/
Good news:
The floppy boots fine. System specs are as before, except the machine has 6.7MB memory. Lots of warnings about needing a 386, otherwise fine.
On the other hand, the same test with a compaq portable 386 (4MB RAM), was not successful. Possibly because the system was unconfigured (CMOS BATTERY FAILURE) so FD didn't find a hard disk. The final message is
'Cannot terminate permanent freeCOM image. System halted … reboot or halt system now _ '
Let me know if this is something that requires more testing on real HW. I have some screenshots.
FWIW - FD runs the Compaq Setup utility (made for DOS 3.1) fine.
Helge
Related
Bugs: #143