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Book8088's CF2IDE stumps Freedos boot (Users)

posted by mceric, Germany, 02.02.2024, 10:17

> A review on another retro forum recommends to upgrade the Book8088 BIOS to
> this one: https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios ...
In more news from there, you sometimes have to have a vendor specific Fixed Disk Mode Flag set on your CF card in order to properly boot from it at all. Industrial CF cards are more likely to have that set than consumer cards for stuff like video cameras and SLR cameras.

I guess an easy test would be to make a diskimage of the original CF card of the Book8088, then overwrite the apparently pre-installed MS DOS there by putting FreeDOS on it?

Of course, you could also use metakern to get dual boot: Metakern offers a menu to load either a FreeDOS kernel or a previously backed up (!) boot sector of another OS. You can use special options of FreeDOS SYS to make a backup of the MS DOS boot sector first.

Remember that FreeDOS will load fdconfig.sys if it exists, so MS DOS can keep using config.sys in the dual boot scenario. In addition, FreeDOS command.com (freecom) supports user-specified file names for autoexec using the SHELL line, so you can give it for example a fdauto.bat file while MS DOS keeps using autoexec.bat

One more thing for the Book8088: Because there is no XMS on 8086 and 8088, you should use an alternate non-XMS swapping variant of freecom, for example that with the KSSF helper. If you would use the default freecom with XMS swapping, it would have to hog a significant portion of your 640k of RAM all the time, even while other programs are running in the foreground.

While we are at it, maybe it would be interesting to share hex dumps of the partition table or full MBR and MS DOS boot sector parameters of the original install bundled with the Book8088?

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FreeDOS / DOSEMU2 / ...

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