A user entered a bug that FreeDOS won't boot on the Book8088.
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/bugs/391/
> Hi. I got myself a Book8088 2.0 recently. It's a Chinese retro computer
> with a NEC V20 processor, 640 kb ram and a CF card as a storage. It uses
> Sergei Kiselev's BIOS_8088 with XTIDE extensions (which enable straight
> up boot from CF card(.
>
> I tried multiple versions of 16-bit FreeDOS kernels (2039-2043) on it,
> but they all get stuck at InitDisk function. It will actually print out
> the partition and detect CHS parameters but will get confused by it and
> try to "correct" it. That will cause it to get stuck.
>
> This little laptop came preinstalled with MS-DOS 6.22 and that works ok.
>
> Btw, It doesn't have an alternative IDE interface, so the CF card is
> only means of storage.
>
> Also, the error still appears even if CF card is formatted as either
> FAT16 or FAT32.
Does anyone have one of these devices, or have more details about the
internals? I know about this only from what I've seen on Facebook:
it's a mini-laptop made from retro hardware with a CF card for
storage, but no floppy.
The bug report indicates that FreeDOS is stopping at the InitDisk function.
The user reports that the device uses a CF card in a CF-to-IDE adapter
to act as storage ("hard drive"). At my first guess, that's probably
the issue. I know others have had mixed results with CF-to-IDE,
usually because the CF-to-IDE isn't correctly emulating IDE or because
the BIOS doesn't recognize the CF-to-IDE correctly. (Seems like
neither is the case here, since the user reports the Book8088 came
with a working copy of pre-installed MS-DOS.)
I think other issues folks have had with CF storage is that the CF
isn't set up right, so it has an incorrect partition table boundary,
or something like that.
My first guess is to ask the user to try a different CF card than the
one they are using now, to see if it's an issue with the CF card
itself.
Suggestions?
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