OK, so here's my report. The report's not overly long but the playing
around was significant and I'm cutting a few corners in the reporting to
get to what I think is the meat of the issue. If you need more detail
on a particular point, please ask but there's no point in making this
longer than it already is.
First, no amount of editing or futzing around with the FDCONFIG.SYS and
FDAUTO.BAT changed the behavior. I continued to get the "read error
while reading drive" error. In frustration, I started to suspect
hardware, even though the drive booted fine after prompting from CD.
Easiest to do was swap HD cartridges with one that was not yet in use.
I had one with a 128 GB PATA SSD that I had targeted for something like
Tiny Linux when I could get around to it. Doing anything else required
swapping something in and out of a cartridge which is a hassle so this
was the easiest test to perform. FreeDOS installed and booted directly
to the SSD with no trouble. I concluded that there was no general
hardware trouble and HD size and timing is probably not the issue -
maybe original HD system became the suspect.
I changed back to the 1.4 GB cartridge and thought maybe a reinstall
would do the trick. I first verified that it would still boot when
directed from the CD but not directly. Unfortunately, FreeDOS would not
reinstall. When directed to reinstall from the CD, it claimed that the
HD was not detected despite it clearly being present in the BIOS setup,
POST displaying its presence with a message and being able to boot from
it when directed from the CD. Something really funky is afoot.
There's something between the hardware and the software's recognition of
the hardware. I don't know much about the interactions there (I'm not
an expert here, just an enthusiast) but I noticed when I installed to
the SSD, the install routine offered to rewrite the MBR. At the SSD
install, I responded 'no' because this was a fresh drive and had never
been used. There was no reason to rewrite the MBR at this point and
everything was fine. When installing to the 1.4 GB spinning media
drive, I probably answered 'yes', though I don't recall, because it was
the default. Could something be funky there? I'm only guessing here.
Something is going wrong with the software recognizing the presence or
configuration of the hard drive. I think that's what is leading to the
"read error while reading drive" when trying to boot as well. I'm
willing to perform suggested experiments. Any help would be welcomed.
Thanks all.
-Rocky
On 10/7/2024 4:39 PM, Michael Rakijas via Freedos-user wrote:
Good thought. I don't have much experience with FreeDOS yet so I
don't know what might issues here. I'll play with it a bit and report
back. Thanks for the idea.
-Rocky
On 10/7/2024 1:48 PM, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote:
Hi! Have you considered the thought that some of your
drivers, or actually their interaction with others,
such as loading a disk cache into your UMB, actually
made disk access fail, while the disk is healthy? ;-)
Try loading fewer drivers, with less daring options.
Do not rely on our defaults to be sane: There is always
some risk that some hardware or BIOS are greater fools
than a possibly foolproof default may have expected :-p
Regards, Eric
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