John, I got ahold of am old Pentium Socket 7 desktop machine with a 3.5" floppy drive and tried the boot floppies on that, and they all booted just fine. So I pulled that drive to use with my SBC-188 and it also booted just fine. MS-DOS 6.22, DR-DOS 7.03, and the FDOS FreeDOS distribution floppy that is supposed to work on any 8086+ all booted.
The first floppy drive that I tried must have been bad.... Andrew On Thursday, July 3, 2014 2:12:38 PM UTC-7, John Coffman wrote: > > Andrew, > > Both MSDOS 5.0 and 6.22 are known to run on the SBC-188, BIOS043. I was > successful creating bootable floppies on an older PC which can still run > MSDOS. The ability to run the 'sys a:' command to transfer the system. > > The DOS 6.22 disk images you refer to may, in fact, not be bootable > disks. The 'Non-system ... ' error message comes from the floppy boot > loader, not from the BIOS. Either IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS (hidden files) were > not there, or there was a disk error reading the directory. There may be a > head alignment difference between your newer (USB) and older 3.5" drives. > Bummer. Can the machine with the USB drive boot DOS from the USB floppy? > > The latest BIOS (043) supports the DOS 'format' command, but if you can't > boot DOS, you can't get to the command to insure that your floppies are > low-level formatted to have tracks aligned with the heads on your drive. A > real chicken-and-egg problem. > > I found a bunch of NOS (new-old-stock) drives on eBay a couple of years > back. A new floppy drive may be the answer. > > --John > > > > > > On 07/02/2014 08:33 PM, Andrew Bingham wrote: > > I'm trying to get my SBC-188 up and running with a 3.5" 1.44 MB floppy > drive. > > I tried writing DOS 6.22 & 6.21 images to some floppies using WinImage, > but those just go to a "Non-system Disk or Disk Error - Insert disk and > press Enter" type error. > > I tried an old FreeDOS 1.44 MB image from 2012 that was reported to work > with the Xi, said 'No' to all the highmem and expanded memory options, but > that didn't work either (I got "data errors" from the floppy driver > eventually). > > Knowing that I am working with the right disk image would go a long way > to helping troubleshoot this. > > I did verify that in the USB Floppy drive I used to make them, all 3 of > the above image+floppy combinations booted a Circa-2010 Core 2 Duo machine > up to DOS successfully. So I'm not sure why at least the 6.22 or 6.21 > didn't work with the SBC-188..... > > At this point I guess there could be: > -A software (BIOS) or hardware problem with my SBC-188 (it gets to Tiny > Basic if no floppy is present and that seems to work okay) > -A hardware problem with the floppy drive I pulled from a bin of random > parts at the makerspace > -Some difference between the USB floppy drive I am using to make the > floppies and the floppy drive hooked > > Is there some kind of ROM-based floppy test routine I can run? Write a > pattern and read it back? Would be very useful. > > Andrew B. > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "N8VEM" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] <javascript:>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/n8vem. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "N8VEM" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/n8vem. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
