Trying to get DOS 6.22 on an SD Card, to then run via an ISA IDE to SD Adapter on my Commodore PC-10 III, but It doesn't wanna boot. What am I doing wrong?

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩ to ⁨retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org⁩

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/6631a69d-a216-4ad1-a463-d7a09d008293.jpeg

I have been following the exact steps as outlined in this tutorial video, with no oddities happening along the way: 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:) Image

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…

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.
source
- Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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…
  
  source
  - TootSweet@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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?
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
Quill0@lemmy.digitalfall.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
- Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source
  - Quill0@lemmy.digitalfall.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well if that doesn’t work I’ll ship an 360kb boot disk to see if that helps. No guarantees it’ll work.
    
    source
lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Would FreeDOS work ? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS

source
- Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
  source
  - lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    wiki.freedos.org/wiki/Main_Page#How_do_I_install_…? There’s more options than a floppy based installer to try.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
drwho@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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?

source
- Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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
  
  source
peron@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source