Hi there, On Sun, 13 Oct 2024, Michael Rakijas via Freedos-user wrote:
... I changed back to the 1.4 GB cartridge ... FreeDOS would not reinstall. ... Something really funky is afoot.
I'm not sure the conclusion there is warranted but I'll admit that I haven't been carefully following the thread. Be aware of the difference between a Master Boot Record (a disc which has been partitioned) and a Volume Boot Record (a disc which has not). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_sector#Partition_tables If it were my drive I'd wipe it clean with a random Linux box using dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<device_id> and then format it with three 512MByte FAT16 partitions using whatever formatting utililty was handy (obviously one of the partitions would not be quite as big as 512MBytes). During the formatting I'd tell it I wanted a DOS MBR on there at sector 0. If the formatting utility can't write a DOS MBR then under DOS you can try something like fdisk /mbr or search online for other ways of writing a MBR. The MBR is tiny and it shouldn't take more than a fraction of a second to write it. If this or the formatting utility say that sector 0 is bad you know where the problem is. I don't think I've ever seen a drive which had any good sectors at all which had a bad sector 0, so I think that's perhaps unlikely but it *is* possible. Assuming this formatting went well enough I'd try installing FreeDOS from a USB stick (because that's what I keep lying around, I never bother with CDs any more) making sure that I use the defaults for *everything* so that nobody could later suggest I've done anything funky if I need to explain what I did. I'd make copious notes about what I did and what I saw in my lab book. If you don't keep a lab book now would be a good time to start. I still have mine from the late 1970s. The first thing you write in there each time you open it is preferably a horizontal ruled line followed by the date and time, and what you plan to do in the following section. Then *everything* that you do and see. Not just the bits that seem interesting. If you don't get anywhere get back to us with all your notes. If it seems like a lot of notes, scan them and put them on a file sharing service somewhere for us. The first thing we want to know that the disc is good. That at least shouldn't be too hard to establish. -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
