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Tandy 2500 SX / 20 Not Booting from Hard Disk

scuzee

New Member
Joined
May 3, 2021
Messages
2
Hello all,

I'm working on my getting my 2500 SX/20 going. The battery had died so I created a dos startup floppy with the setupsx program. After re configuring I still cannot boot off of the original hard disk with windows 3.1. It only wants to boot off of drive A. If I boot into the floppy dos I can switch to drive c and look at all the files. Trying to run "win" on drive c tells me "himem.sys" not found.

I've tried reinstalling dos on 2 different hard drives, with 2 sets of 6.0 install diskettes. Everything works and it tells me to remove all floppy disks and reboot. When I do it just tells me to insert the system diskette. I've tried all different permutations of IDE cable/jumpers. I tried running "sys c:" on drive A, and it returns success. I don't know how to tell the computer to boot off the hard drive. I don't remember there being some magic to it.

Thanks for any suggestions!
 
I assume you made the first partition active? (but that doesn't explain why the original HDD won't boot anymore) Another trick is to put any of those HDDs in another more or less equivalent syste and see if that system boots from this HDD. If it does, the installation worked fine. OK, won't help you right away but then you know the problem is in the Tandy itself and not your doing.
 
At this point it looks like there is a problem with the Tandy 3.5" drive. I would have tried replacing it earlier but I don't have any of the proprietary tandy drives that get power through the data cable.

I found a video where someone modified a cable to use a standard drive. I did the modification on a spare cable and now it fires right up even with the drive plugged in. I don't know much about the interaction between the BIOS and floppy drive, I wouldn't think a drive could force booting from it. Thanks for the help though.
 
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