I have been following the exact steps as outlined in this tutorial video, with no oddities happening along the way: https://youtu.be/twQbHWJF7LA
Well, I was able to follow it up and until we got to the Partitioning part, where he says to load DOS up in the machine, presumably meaning the PC-10 in this case.
The PC-10 loads the ISA IDE to SD Adapter just fine, it even tried to look for Drive C (The SD Card) for like 10-15 seconds, until giving up then and there (as seen in the pic).
(ISA IDE to SD card Adapter i got:)
In other words it seems that the Adapter either doesn’t recognise what is on the Card and I’ve done something wrong in burning the provided image onto it or formating, or it doesn’t recognise the card itself to begin with. Its a Brand new 32GB SanDisk SD so that be pretty suprising…
In other words… im out of ideas… i tried different DIP switch configurations and all, but no change. Perhaps the PC-10 III Simply doesnt like the Adapter… or can’t run 6.22… im just out of ideas and frustrated. I’ve had this thing for over a month now with no luck in seeing it run once properly, and original 5,25" DOS Bootdisks are expensive and take a while to arrive. Should I just bite the bullet and go for one? I don’t know. Any advice is much appreciated…
Just some thoughts off the top of my head.
- Did you burn the image to the partition on the card or to the card? (You’ll want to do the latter.)
- You might want to try booting from the card before expanding the partition to 2GB just to make sure the partitioning program isn’t doing anything bad.
- Can you check and see if one of the partitions on the card is marked as a boot partition?
- Maybe just open the disk itself in a hex editor if you can and make sure whether the MBR seems to have bootloader code in it.
I did try to see if leaving the partitioning part out changes anything, and still nothing. Same thing as before. Also tried not changing sizes, same thing sadly.
As for the other 2 points, im afraid that I don’t have the knowhow yet as to how to check those…
I’m not familiar with the tool they talked about for burning the image to the SD card, but can you share a screen shot of the options you used when burning the image?
I’ll do once im home in around 7 hours! In the mean time, I can definetly say that what the Video shows is 1 to 1 the same thing I saw while working with both programs and I followed them to the Pixel if that helps
Just got around to taking some screenshots.
First I press the “Flash from File” button and choose the DOS6.22 Ultimate .img
Then I select the Target, which is the SD Card
Then Lastly I press the Flash button and it does its thing
All ending without error on this screen
This is what the finished thing then looks like
Then I’d usually move onto the Partition Wizard.
Something odd I just noticed is that even after all the flashing and stuff, the card retains its original thumbnail saying “SD HC”, would’ve thought that be gone by now, could that be an issue?
Ah! SDHC.
So, SDHC cards are a little different than regular SD cards (the protocol used to communicate with the card is a little different) and often aren’t supported by particular SD card readers like potentially the SD-to-IDE adapter you’re using.
(I know back in the day, I hacked my Nintendo Wii, which involved loading a bunch of homebrew programs on an SD card, and at first it didn’t support SDHC cards until there was a firmware update.)
Technically, I think any SD card can be SDHC, but almost always SDHC is only used by high-capacity cards. Also, I think they usually say “SDHC” physically on the card.
So, probably the next thing I’d try if I was you was to change out your SDHC card for a non-HC SD card. Any 8GB to 32GB card should be fine, I’d think. (If you have any that are smaller even than that, like 256MB, even, you could at least use it to confirm that’s the issue. You just couldn’t expand the partition sizes out to 2GB.)
I see, in that case I’ll go to the store tomorrow and see if they got a tiny non HC SD card! Thank you!
It’s apparent it sees the SD card, but it’s not seeing the MBR on it. I doubt the DOS version is the issue, because it’s not event attempting to boot. Unfortunately there’s no guarantee your 360kb floppy drives are in working order if you don’t know already. I usually recommend a flash floppy but for an machine like this you’re really getting into the weeds with it not being bootable. Try an different SD card, they can be weird, smaller is better. And try writing a different dos bootable image to it.
Yeah I’m getting a different SD card tomorrow. One thats notably not an HC SD card, which someone noted to probably be not compatible with the adapter.
Well if that doesn’t work I’ll ship an 360kb boot disk to see if that helps. No guarantees it’ll work.
Would FreeDOS work ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS
I did think of that too after DOS failed, but from what I can find there only seems to be a floppy based installer for it? Since It doesnt have a working 3,5" drive, I can’t install it via that. That or have I overlooked something while looking into it? Is there a way to burn it into an SD Card?
https://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/Main_Page#How_do_I_install_FreeDOS? There’s more options than a floppy based installer to try.
As far as I can see, the only one of these relevant to my XT Based PC-10 III would be the classic version which reads
For classic hardware: FreeDOS 1.3 includes a floppy-only edition! This edition should run on any original IBM PC system, including the PC, XT, and AT. Provides versions for 720kB, 1.2MB, and 1.44MB floppy disks.
Since it says its a floppy version, I’d asume I’d have to burn it onto a floppy and then install it? Or can I burn it onto the SD and then somehow boot it into the installer directly?
There has to be a way of getting FreeDOS onto the SD card. Way back when, there used to be ways of getting a floppy disk (and hard drive, I did it a few times) bootable with the SYS command to write the boot files to the right places. That was MS-DOS, though.
Hmm.
This article seems like it could be helpful.. It’s for creating a disk image, not a drive, but the commands should work if you substitute in the SD card you want to use.
Please note that I haven’t actually tried any of this. I’m at work and trying to pull together what scraps of knowledge I still have from my DOS days into something that seems coherent. This might not work, so please treat it as kicking some ideas around over coffee right now!
ms-sys basically does the same thing that
format /s
andsys a:
used to do back in the days of DOS. That makes a drive bootable. So, you’d partition and format your SD card as VFAT or FAT32 from your box (I don’t know if you have a Linux box or a Windows machine, or what). I’m guessing it’d be something like this:sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 # New DOS disk label o # New partition. n p 1 t c a 1 w
Format the partition on the SD card:
sudo mkfs.vfat -c -v -F32 /dev/mmcblk0p1
Then use
ms-sys
to write the MBR to the SD card.sudo ms-sys --mbrdos /dev/mmcblk0p1
Mount the SD card. Download FreeDOS and uncompress it. I think that would be FD13-FullUSB.zip. There doesn’t seem to be a downloadable archive of “Here’s all the stuff that’s in the disk image,” just the disk image. Some gymnastics do seem to be required to mount it:
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 FD13FULL.img sudo fdisk -l /dev/loop0 Disk /dev/loop0: 512 MiB, 536870912 bytes, 1048576 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/loop0p1 * 63 1048319 1048257 511.8M e W95 FAT16 (LBA)
The gymnastics in question have to do with mounting a partition of the disk image, because you can’t just set up the disk image and manipulate it like a disk device. In this case, it’s calculating where to mount the FreeDOS partition: sector size * first sector == 512 * 63 == 32256
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0 sudo losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 FD13FULL.img sudo mount /dev/loop0 /mnt
From there, it looks like you’ll have to look at /mnt/setup.bat to figure out how to do a manual setup of FreeDOS on the SD card. There is also a /mnt/FDOS-x86/SETUP.BAT file that I think will have to be read through to get the process figured out.
Again, this is all theoretical. I’ve no idea if it’ll work without tinkering with it on real hardware. It’s as close to figuring out how to do a manual installation as I have time for right now.
I haven’t played around with SD adapters but there is a common problem with compact flash cards that gives the same symptom. They won’t be bootable until you fire up DOS 6.22 and run FDISK /MBR, which is an undocumented command which gives no output but fixes the boot record. I would focus on getting the floppy drive working or buy a gotek so you can boot floppy images from USB and get into DOS that way.
Have you tried a smaller card? 32GB was pretty well unheard of, even in the DOS 6.22 days.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve thought about stuff like this. It reminds me of when I was trying to get a 1GB drive working on a 486 when I was in college. The drive wasn’t seen (just like you’re seeing). What I had to do was install the manufacturer’s backwards compatibility software (it was for systems that were too old to have BIOSes that recognized drives that big) so that the BIOS, when it probed the hard drive would somehow load a TSR that added support for large hard drives.
Looking up the card in question, it loads the XTIDE BIOS, and the card has “Select XT-CF(PIO) Mode/Base IO 300h” silkscreened on the back. Zooming in on the front of the card, it doesn’t look like you can set that on the DIP switch block for some reason. I don’t see any documentation for download from the site. Did any docs come with the card?
No there wasn’t any documentation that was delivered with it sadly. Though seeing that in the tutorial it showed much of the same text on Boot up, i think its safe to asume the card itself works fine. Someone else in the thread mentioned that it might not work because its an HC SD card, which probably can’t be read by the adapter, so tomorrow im buying a normal SD card to try it tho
DOS disk interface is quite mundante. It was dependant on BIOS recognition, and its not compatible with 32 GB disk at all. An 120MB or 250MB HDD was the usual MS-DOS disk sold during the 6.22 era. The firsts GB disk ware common by 1996. By the way, 2GB is the max recognizable partition size. Use fdisk to create a Master Boot Record, and a 2GB partition, and try it. I tried it with ease with old 1 GB and 512MB Compact Flash cards, but I must say CF has almost direct compatibility with IDE. SD cards require an adapter controller (you seems to have one of those, tho).