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Book8088's CF2IDE stumps Freedos boot (Users)

posted by fritz.mueller Homepage, Munich, Germany, 30.01.2024, 13:57

> > i read the report about this laptop and noticed that a picture with
> another
> > OS on it. So it should be possible anyhow although an it was reported
> that
> > the usb stick cannot boot but only copy files. Interesting challenge.
>
> What other OS? I'm curious.
> ELKS should work. At least in
> the latest release, as they ironed out some Book8088 specific bugs
> recently. I also saw a
> Youtube video of it running Minix 1.7.5.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/going-deep...8-the-brand-new-laptop-that-runs-like-its-1981/
5th big picture, it shows PC-DOS version 7, revision 1.

I just ran some tests with my old Kingston 512 MB compact flash connected via USB and three different adapters with an old DOS laptop from 2005.
The result was interesting:
a) with hama USB 2.0 Card Reader 19 in 1 the CF was NOT found at all, not by fdisk and not by ranish partition manager,
b) with Conrad Electronic Model CP440 it was found, fdisk and ranish partition manager worked - but at the end the results were NOT written on the CF (write protection), after a reboot there was NOTHING,
c) with an old Skymaster USB 2.0 Multi Card Reader read and write worked, but after running fdisk and a reboot format had problems. Then I ran ranish partition manager delivered with FDT23xx, it was able to format the CF with it, but it made a mismatch.
Then I formatted it again with format - and this time it worked! I was able to run sys - and the kernel and command.com was on it! But with the actual configuration I was unable to test if it really boots.
So installing FD on to a new 512 MB CF card is a thing of good luck.

The article above mentioned that you can buy the laptop with and without support for diskettes etc. They say that the USB stick is not bootable, so I am still astonished how you made it to make MS-DOS work again after the FD kernel did not run through. Del kernel.sys should not work from this position - only if you connect the CF with another machine.
One more thing: MS-DOS has several basic files: io.sys, msdos.sys, dblspace.bin and command.com. Some of these files are hidden! This may cause problems too.

So my proposal would be: If you have one more empty 512 MB CF card, (I just looked, the prices vary from 14 Euro till 225 Euro, crazy), check if your card reader supports read/write from DOS, if yes, try to format it from an external machine, (dont forget Active Partition), run sys and test this CF.

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