Login
You're viewing the 101010.pl public feed.
  • Greglygregly@retro.pizza
    Oct 21, 2026, 4:57 PM

    It works!

    The issue: according to Norton Utilities, the partition type was BIGDOS instead of FAT-16. Not sure why; DOS 4.01 FDISK shouldn’t have marked it as BIGDOS as far as I know. Also don’t know why that would give the XT-IDE trouble, but whatever…

    Problem now is this is a 16GB CF card using only 528MB of its space, so I ordered a few other brands of 1GB card in the hopes that one of them will work.

    Another thing I realized while running diagnostics: my naive 9-pin CGA to 15-pin VGA adapter cable ignores the intensity bit, so I’d need some in-between circuitry to get all the colors showing properly! (Edit: oh hey look, a circuit for almost exactly what I need: edn.com/cga-scart-adapter/)

    (Edit 2: the drive will absolutely not work with this hack as-is; it would corrupt anything past 32MB due to the partition type being wrong)

    #retrocomputing

    A screenshot of my IBM PC 5150 successfully booting off of a CompactFlash card, *finally*. It has managed to get to the C> prompt.
    💬 2🔄 0⭐ 3

Replies

  • derSammlerderSammler@oldbytes.space
    Oct 21, 2026, 5:09 PM

    @gregly You should REALLY use MS-DOS 5.0. I had all the same issues with older versions. They would not boot either.

    And yes, same setup. XTIDE in a 5150.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Kyle Brown :DBFHBear:Wearwolf@kind.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 5:11 PM

    @gregly there are two versions of FAT-16, the first introduced with DOS 3.0 changed the file allocation table entries to be 16-bits but didn't change the amount of space that could be allocation to a partition. FAT-16B introduced by Compaq MS DOS 3.31 did support larger partition sizes

    The original FAT-16 only supports partition sizes of 32K so that's probably not what you want

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 1
  • Greglygregly@retro.pizza
    Oct 21, 2026, 5:15 PM

    @Wearwolf Definitely not. I’m sure using the system as it is would cause massive data corruption the moment I passed 32MB of use. But at least I know why it wasn’t booting now. I guess I could create a 32MB FAT-16 partition to boot from and a 528MB extended BIGDOS partition for data, but I’m not a masochist 😆

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Kyle Brown :DBFHBear:Wearwolf@kind.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 5:20 PM

    @gregly I was playing around with the FASTART installation tool that came with Compaq MSDOS 3.31 and it's suggestion was an extended partition containing "Fifteen 511.8 Megabyte and One 344.0 Megabyte" sub-partitions

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 1
  • Greglygregly@retro.pizza
    Oct 21, 2026, 5:24 PM

    @Wearwolf I remember having to do similar way back when I got a big (170MB) drive as a kid, but for 32MB partition sizes. I don’t know how my dad acquired such a large drive for the time; it might’ve been surplused by one of his customers (he was a field technician) and someone surreptitiously handed it to him instead of destroying it. I mean, he certainly didn’t *buy* something that expensive! 😆

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0