DOS ain't dead

Running ST-DOS on Book8088 (Developers)

posted by samwdpckr, 27.02.2024, 11:28
(edited by samwdpckr on 27.02.2024, 16:29)

I am interested in seeing ST-DOS ran on a Book8088. I don't have one of those machines myself, so I cannot investigate how it works, but I want to make a bootable USB storage image for it.

Because it does not have other storage I/O than the USB port for USB storage sticks, and it is an XT-class machine so its BIOS probably does not support LBA, I need to know how it detects the geometry of the USB stick. Usually all USB images of modern operating systems only use LBA, because they assume that the BIOS supports it. That's also what the current USB storage image of ST-DOS does.

The FAT filesystem is very dependent on the geometry of the disk, so the problem is that the same filesystem image does not fit all USB storage sticks.

Does the BIOS call int13,8 work normally for the USB drive? In that case it should be possible to write a bootloader that adjusts itself to the geometry that is returned by the BIOS.

Complete thread:

• Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - samwdpckr, 27.02.2024, 11:28
  • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - glennmcc, 27.02.2024, 18:39
    • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - RayeR, 27.02.2024, 18:50
  • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - Oso2k, 27.02.2024, 23:03
    • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - samwdpckr, 27.02.2024, 23:28
      • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - mceric, 28.02.2024, 00:26
        • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - Oso2k, 28.02.2024, 00:53
          • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - roytam, 28.02.2024, 08:13
        • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - roytam, 28.02.2024, 00:53
          • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - glennmcc, 28.02.2024, 01:03
          • Running ST-DOS on Book8088 - roytam, 29.02.2024, 04:11