Calling Even Older Oldies! (than Dwellman)

[ChipDeath]

Sorry Dave, but I logged in to make a post, and You'd already nicked the subject I was planning to use...

Anyways, I'm attempting to change a HDD on a 486SX33. I can't get the stupid thing to boot off it.

I've fdisked, formatted, 'sys'ed it, and copied all I need off the old one (old = 170Mb POS, new=2.5Gb POS, but 1 partition of 500Mb), but the stupid thing refuses to boot off this disk. If I boot off a floppy the HDD is fine, everything looks peachy, but when I try to boot off the HDD, I get a nasty message, (text looks like DOS screen <b>'MODE CO40'</b> for those a bit long in the tooth..), saying :
<font color=blue>
NO ROM BASIC
SYSTEM HALTED
</font color=blue>
Happens right after the POST sequence (takes 20secs to count 8 megs of RAM! LOL).

In case you're wondering, It's a customers PC, and they've supplied both old and new drives..

Any ideas people? [I know, It's a paperweight really.... ] It's gotta happily run an old DOS product that we no longer sell, but still support.

---
$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

 

[pIII_Man]

eew...an SX...

could it be that it is not recognising large drives...or the drive is not correctly jumpered...

So easy to fry yet tastes so good...
Silicon: The other, other, other white meat

 

[ChipDeath]

It doesn't recognise Large drives, but it's only formatted to 500Mbs. The system has no trouble with reading the drive, I just can't get it to boot off it. If I just slap a bootable floppy in the drive, it's all fine, I can browse it, run programs on it, whatever..

Fancy a copy of win3.11 for workgroups? LOL.

I think I've got a old 1Gb drive around here somewhere. I'll try that tommorrow I reckon.

---
$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

 

[pIII_Man]

and this 500mb partition is set as the active partition?

Have you installed an os on that partition yet...(i have windows 3.11...running on a partition of my computer...along with dos 6.22 and gem 3.1...all just for kicks)

So easy to fry yet tastes so good...
Silicon: The other, other, other white meat

 

[xeenrecoil]

heya Chipdeath;

Are we talking DOS 5.0 or what?

When you F-Disked the Drive and formated it did you also mark the drive as bootable?

i just woke up, so im a little groggy, i will think on this some more.

XeeN

 

[pIII_Man]

xeen and i put our heads together and confirmed that this is a problem is due to the fact that you have your drives incorrectly set up...here is a <A HREF="http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000185.htm" target="_new">link</A> of possible problems....

So easy to fry yet tastes so good...
Silicon: The other, other, other white meat

 

[pIII_Man]

also...how did you go about installing dos...did you use a boot disk?

If so...you cannot just copy the boot disks files onto your hard drive...first you must boot from the boot disk...then do a FORMAT /S...this will copy system files to the hard drives...then finally do a COPY A:\*.* C:\

then remove the startup disk...restart and you should have yourself runing DOS!

So easy to fry yet tastes so good...
Silicon: The other, other, other white meat

 

[Crashman]

DOOD, I threw away around 100 DX33's about 2 years ago, I could have given you a free upgrade! Remember when Cyrix was a GOOD company, back in the 486 days, they had the ultra fast L1 cache? I still have a couple of those, DX/2-66, new in box, if you need them!


Anyway, that's also around the time I threw away a dozen or so working 512MB hard drives.

I think it's not booting off the drives because something's set wrong in BIOS. You have them manually set as 500MB in BIOS using CHS values, no?

If it's a late model 486 board with PCI slots, I'd recommend an PCI IDE controller to solve your problems. Imagine an 80GB ultra fast drive on that thing! If it has no PCI...sorry, I threw away all my 486-PCI boards...around 2 years ago.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[ChipDeath]

thanks for the input guys - I'd forgotten to mark the partition as Active.

Just ran FDisk, set as active, rebooted, everything is peachy.

I didn't format /S[normally would, but forgot this time], I just used the SYS command afterwards, which amounts to the same thing....

It's DOS 6.2 - I forgot because newer FDisk versions Automatically make the partition Active, so the thought of doing so manually never entered my head.

Thanks for the input guys.

---
$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

 

[Crashman]

Did you know that you can make up to a 2GB partition in Fat16 using a newer version of fdisk?

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[pIII_Man]

you can make a 2.2gb partition using the fdisk in dos 6.22

So easy to fry yet tastes so good...
Silicon: The other, other, other white meat

 

[ChipDeath]

That's a good point actually... If it was my PC, I'd sort that out now... but It's only for running our old crappy DOS system, and 171Mb to 500 will be fine I'm sure. You should see the inside of this thing - everything is Lovely nicotine yellow, as it's been smoking passively for 10 years, locked in a little broom-cupboard sized office. It really stinks too, as you'd expect.

I'll bear the 2Gb thing in mind if I have to fiddle with this sort of stuff again (which is actually quite likely).


---
$hit Happens. I just wish it would happen to someone else for a change.

 

[Crashman]

Yes, that's the version used on the Win95 bootdisk, IIRC.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

OK, I just picked up a spare system for you. It's a 486SX-20 with some kind of CD-ROM, a 3.5 floppy, a 5.25" floppy, a tape drive, and 4MB RAM. I'll upgrade it to 8MB and give you a spare 486DX-2/66 if you want to install it. It has no hard drive, but I might be able to find one.

It's yours free if you pay shipping.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

Oh, best part besides free, is that it's a mini-tower.



<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[pIII_Man]

does the cdrom you disk caddies?

How many bits are in a nibble?

 

[Crashman]

No, it's one of those early Panasonic drives, 2x I believe.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>