On 9/8/20 6:04 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Date and time of Command.com and any other DOS files will identify the
version number.
I've got 11/26/85 on command.com.
DIR /A or
DIR /A:H
will let you see the hidden files (presumably IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS; PC-DOS
had IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM instead)
The /a switch isn't part of the dir command in whatever 3.3 version I have.
However, I just wrote a DOS 6.22 boot disk and that shows three hidden
files on the hard disk:
MSDOS.SYS (11/18/85)
MIO.SYS (11/18/85)
SD.INI
I'm guessing that the 'M' in MIO.SYS is "Mitsubishi" and the OS is tailored
in some way to the machine.
TYPEing "sd.ini" indicates that it's related to Norton Speed Disk - not a
program I'm familiar with, but as that appears to be a defragmenter, it
might hint at why my drive isn't bootable and seems to be having problems
with various executables - I wonder if the directory structure "looks
sane", but file contents have been completely mangled.
Can you COPY files from the HDD to floppy?
Just filling up a few 360K disks with files at random so far, yes. But
difficult to say if the file contents are correct.
Looking at the drive contents, incidentally, I didn't see anything that
explains (or interacts with) that unusual video hardware - it basically
just holds DOS and a bunch of documents written by the original owner.
Maybe they got suckered into buying this fancy graphics hardware without
having any actual need for it, and then of course EGA and VGA came along
and rendered it obsolete anyway.
It is probably completely CGA compatible, unless you invoke of of its other
modes.
Maybe. Assuming that the hard drive's directory contents are intact, and
therefore there's nothing too unusual on the drive, I've perhaps got
nothing to lose by reformatting - the only issue is that MIO.SYS, how it
differs from Microsoft's, whether it's corrupt or not, and how - if it is
intact - I can migrate it over post-install.
Of course maybe speed disk (if that is even the cause of my problems) has
some kind of backup / undo aspect, but I doubt it.
