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Book8088's CF2IDE stumps Freedos boot (Users)

posted by bocke, 02.02.2024, 12:35

> 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.
 >

Is there any software to set this or is this done in factory>

> 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?
>

We tried that. Unfortunately, it didn't work.

> 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.
>

Haven't tried yet. But it seems this machine is picky about boot sectors. Might not work as well as on a real IDE drive.

> 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
>

That's an interesting idea if metakern successfully boots. But will have to test if it will boot at all.

> 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.
>

I've been using M. Viszte's Svarcom as an alternative. It's only about 30k and doesn't have unneed bells and wistles.

> 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?
The original image was uploaded in boeckmann's nextcloud:
https://nextcloud.iww.rwth-aachen.de/index.php/s/rjmZzcJrZkWMcrE

But I don't see it now. I will reupload. It might not be the exact same image, but mbr and partition table should be the same as it was based on the original.

Sorry, Boeckmann for flooding your nexcloud. :)

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