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Xtide CF card for XT not bootable after file transfer using win98?

H

Haunter_1

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Mar 26, 2021
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Northeast Pennsylvania, USA.
Hello Everyone,

My PC-Dos 4.01 CF card was working perfectly on my PC XT until I used a Windows 98 machine to transfer some files (in gui, not dos prompt). Now, when plugged back into the XT, it will not boot from c:\. I haven't had any issues using a Windows 10 machine to manage files and I am wondering if this has happened to anyone else. Could the Master Boot Record have been changed? I will be trying to boot using serdrive to see if the partition is still recognized etc, but i figured I would check in to see if anyone else has had this happen to them.


My Xtide is a Blue Lava Systems with Bios Ver. 2.0.
 
Yep, Windows 98 does this to me as well, but curiously Win95B does not. Boot your system with floppy that contains FDISK and SYS. At the prompt type:

FDISK /MBR

When the prompt reappears reboot the machine and see if the CF card boots. If so, run a SCANDISK on the card allowing it to repair all issues found.

If the CF card still won't boot then boot from the floppy and type:

SYS C:

This will rewrite the boot files on the CF card. If the CF boots then make sure to run SCANDISK.

While my Win95B machine does not affect booting of the CF cards it does still tamper with the card. I have to run SCANDISK every time to correct the issues.
 
Thank you for the quick response kc8eyt! I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one and that my mbr guess was right.

I don't think the PC-DOS 4.01 version has the fdisk /mbr command or scandisk, but i'll see what I can do.
 
Haunter_1 said:
Thank you for the quick response kc8eyt! I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one and that my mbr guess was right.

I don't think the PC-DOS 4.01 version has the fdisk /mbr command or scandisk, but i'll see what I can do.
Click to expand...

I don't believe the IBM PC-DOS 4.00 or 4.01 had all of the problems commonly associated with the MS version, but I've alway been a bit leery of DOS 4 in any version. If DOS 4.01 is all you have then that's it, else I would recommend DOS 5.0 as a precaution.
 
Yeah, sorry, I should have realized DOS 4 wouldn't have the undocumented FDISK switch. SYS may still work for you. SCANDISK may run even though it came with DOS 6.2, I can't confirm that though. DOS 4 is a version of DOS I always stayed away from.
 
Thanks for all the replies. The only reason I'm not using DOS 5.x or higher is because I can't seem to get it to display correctly on my 5155 which I do not have a (working) CGA monitor for. DOS 4 is simply the highest version I am able to display that will allow me to create larger partitions on the CF card. Dos 4.01 also has a strange installation procedure which I'm not a fan of.

Now that the card is backed up I'll try to clear the mbr one way or another and go from there. Luckily I'm able to write 5.25" Floppys on the Windows 98 machine and the 5155 has a dual 360k drives so I should be able to experiment.
 
There was a version of DOS 3, version 3.31, made for Compaq that allowed for larger partition sizes up to 512MB. Even though it was made for Compaq it should work on any compatible. Might be worth looking into. You can get it here:

https://winworldpc.com/product/ms-dos/331

What do mean by DOS 5 not displaying correctly? I've never run across that.
 
Haunter_1 said:
Thanks for all the replies. The only reason I'm not using DOS 5.x or higher is because I can't seem to get it to display correctly on my 5155 which I do not have a (working) CGA monitor for. DOS 4 is simply the highest version I am able to display that will allow me to create larger partitions on the CF card. Dos 4.01 also has a strange installation procedure which I'm not a fan of.

Now that the card is backed up I'll try to clear the mbr one way or another and go from there. Luckily I'm able to write 5.25" Floppys on the Windows 98 machine and the 5155 has a dual 360k drives so I should be able to experiment.
Click to expand...

If you simply dumped the 5.0 files into the 4.01 directory that may be part of your problem. You will need to do a SYS C: after booting with the 5.0 floppy.
 
kc8eyt said:
There was a version of DOS 3, version 3.31, made for Compaq that allowed for larger partition sizes up to 512MB. Even though it was made for Compaq it should work on any compatible. Might be worth looking into. You can get it here:

https://winworldpc.com/product/ms-dos/331

What do mean by DOS 5 not displaying correctly? I've never run across that.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip, I will definitely do that on my 2nd CF card! I really like DOS 3.x because I don't use the shell or file manager much anyway.

As for the DOS 5.0 versions, I tried several clean installations of MS and PC-DOS from 360k Disks, and Serdrive, however the setup screens on the 9" display and composite output were unreadable. What was being displayed looked like multiple line of text being merged into single lines or something. I checked if it was the display or the Disk by printing the screen to my NEC Pinwriter which looked great. I did the full installation process using the printer as the output device and the result was a bootable, but not visually readable DOS 5.0 from the CF card.

I had thought that maybe the issue was due to something I had learned from modem7 regarding certain programs displaying poorly on the 5155s 9" composite display since they believe they are running on an early 5160 with a CGA color monitor. I thought perhaps that the screens converted to monochrome where just not readable, but I did not do too much research into it afterwards. I had tried in both 40 and 80 column mode with the same results in both. I definitely wouldn't rule out another issue though.
 
Last edited:
kc8eyt said:
Here is a possible solution to your DOS 5 display issues:

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/5155/problems/5155_display_problems.htm
Click to expand...

Thanks kc8eyt,

I gave it a try, but it to no avail. I'm not sure what is causing it, I'll try to do some digging before starting yet another help thread. I have a suspicion that I'm either failing to do something procedure wise, or there may be something wrong with my graphics adapter that only shows itself while running certain programs. I'm able to nicely play all of the XDV videos I've made using Trixter's XDC compiler, and text mode in all other forms of DOS looks great.

Back to the CF card mbr issue however, I wonder if the Win98 PC has the /mbr switch and if I can use fdisk /mbr against the CF "E:" drive. I can select the drive using fdisk in the win98 DOS prompt, but I don't know what or if I can do anything from there.
 
I believe FDISK /MBR only works on the boot drive, therefore it would only apply to the Windows 98 boot drive (C:).
 
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