Hi Andrew,
> 1) Both use IDE connectors, no sata. > > 2) The error simply says disk read error in the pentium 2. The i486 simply > has a black screen, like it is trying to load the OS but cannot. Both > computer see the hard drive in the bios ( no hard drive post errors). At which point, using which exact wording? Could it be that your BIOS has a bug in LBA support? > 3) I installed DOS 6 on the pentium 2 on a hdd, moved the hdd to the i486, > and it boots up every time, and works correctly. Currently the i486 does > not see any floppy drive or the gotek I have, but it sees the hdd What is a gotek? Does the floppy work with another OS? Proper wiring, proper jumpers, proper BIOS CMOS setup? I assume you mean MS DOS 6 by DOS 6? And you had to use the Pentium2 to install it for the 486 because even MS DOS cannot use the floppy on the 486? Note that MS DOS 6 never uses LBA, so if your LBA BIOS has a bug, this would not affect MS DOS, but this also limits it to at most 8 GB usable disk size. You can also use a special feature of our SYS command to modify a flag in your FreeDOS kernel file to either disable or force LBA, in case LBA or CHS is broken. Depending on whether you use FAT16 or FAT32 partitions, you can use different boot sectors to prefer CHS or LBA, but I am not sure how to access this via SYS command line options. This depends on the specific version of our SYS you use. This may also depend on your BIOS CMOS setup choices. > 4) it does not get far enough to offer the JEMMEX option on either computer. How far exactly does it get? > 5) When you load either a Windows 98 CD, or a freedos CD in the pentium 2, > both give an option to boot from hdd. When I do this freedos boots. You say FreeDOS boots okay from harddisk when you first start to boot from a Win98 or FreeDOS CD and then abort that to continue booting from harddisk, on the Pentium2? > 6) I tried formatting it on 98 then installing freedos to the partition, > but it still gives the same error. However this is with automated > installer, perhaps with manual installation the problem can be fixed. That sounds like a question for Jerome. But as said, if you can, skip partitioning (and maybe even formatting) the disk in case you ran into a bug of FDISK (which that recent update may have fixed). It is indeed possible that the MBR itself causes troubles with booting. Our FDISK has some options to overwrite the boot code with one of the built-in templates of FDISK, but you could also just keep the boot code left behind by Win98. Our FDISK has he options /MBR and /BMBR and you can also use the /SMBR to copy the MBR to a file and /AMBR to copy a file to the MBR etc. > When DOS or 98 sees the freedos partiton, with it installed, > it calls it a non-dos partition. Not sure why. You would have to be more specific about that, for example using FDISK /INFO /TECH or /STATUS or /DUMP or similar, although for my taste, those are still not verbose enough, so maybe simply show hexdumps of the right MBR after copying it to a file ;-) > 7) I downloaded freedos last week, if should be up to date. I did see some > old forums from 2002 or so with similar, but not exactly the same problem, > that were fixed however. I meant the FDISK update by Japheth and Tom, see: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=17440 Given that this was about 1.3.1 while GITHUB as 1.3.4: https://gitlab.com/FDOS/base/fdisk/-/tree/master/BIN While the 1.3rc4 boot CD has 1.3.4a, it should be up to date: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/previews/1.3-rc4/report.html > 8) Could the bios not be able to compensate for the cylinder problem, > causing it not to boot? Which is why it can boot from bios to cd to hdd, > but not bios to hdd? It could be that the BIOS and DOS disagree about the geometry, but given that both agree about sector and head, just not about the cylinder, I would rather expect this to be a problem with FDISK or a bogus warning from the kernel in case it has a bug regarding the decision when to show the message. But unlikely. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
