I have a compuadd 286 which I got recently that was running DOS5 just fine. It had a boot sector virus on it which I attempted to get rid of a few times. I was able to hook up a 3.25" floppy drive to it but it never could read from any disks sucesfully. I got a win3.11 disk set to begin installation but it failed. Flash forward to 2 weeks ago. I pulled my amd K6 box out and hooked the 286's hdd up to it and formatted it and installed DrDOS. Plug the cable back into the 286, it says "Cannot boot DOS". Repeat but install with MS-DOS6.22 and it can't find any OS at all. I've got a set of DOS4 install disks in 5.25" form I can use, but it won't boot from floppies. Anyone know if theres a key your supposed to hold or any possible fix?

The bios in early pc's supported 5.25" floppies (maybe only DD) and would thus boot from them as A:

In order to support 3.5" floppies, a driver was loaded in config.sys and the drive became B: but (obviously) could not be booted from.

a) I think you should be able to boot from a 5.25" floppy in A:, but watch the disc density, (maybe 360kb only)

b) possibly when you formatted your hdd, you set up up such that it cannot be read on the 286. Think it should use fat16.

Good luck - Keep us posted

Maybe it is a clunker which only recognises FAT12 ?????

A 286 almost certainly would support 1.2Mb 5¼" floppies - possibly it might only be able to use 720K 3½", depending.

This is an IDE HDD I suppose? What capacity? Doubtful if there's an actual CMOS on this relic, but there may be a setup program. Battery (if original) is very likely dead as well

Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid. -John Wayne

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I'll have to give it a shot at FAT12. It seemed to like DrDOS more than MS-DOS6.11 so maybe the file system and boot sectors were setup more to its liking. It is in fact an IDE hdd. It's an old ~80mb Western Digital. I'm not sure of the exact size as I don't have it hooked up through my k6, which is the only way I can measure it right now. I know its not any larger than 100mb and any smaller than 70mb.

When I originally crammed a 3.25" floppy drive into it I put win3.11 images onto 1.44mb floppies. It read them at first then started to get read errors. All 3 of my spare floppy drives are "modern" perse, most of them are probably 10 years or so old but far newer than anything the 286 would have seen.

I don't know if theres a cmos, as it's never said "Press button x to go into setup". I know its got hirom/lorom versions of the bios, I'm a bit rusty with all of this so I can't remember the significance.

I did bid and win on a 386 with 5.25" and 3.25" drives. Hopefully I can use it to convert the 5.25" discs over to a bootable state. All I've got aside from DOS4 install disks is some ati driver disks and a set of something called IMSI. No clue on the capacities as my spare 5.25" drive doesn't want to work on any of my machines any more. It used to work wonderfully with the k6 a few years ago and I did image the DOS4 disks, but the images were lost some time ago. Might be a good time to invest money in some older floppies.

"I did bid and win on a 386"

Are you *serious* ??

Quite a 'prize'

Considering that Pentium ones and twos are winding up in landfills, you could likely spend your money more wisely. It's one thing to work on these old boxes for the experience etc, but I wouldn't spend any Do Re Me on one

DOS4 is reputed to be the worst. DOS. ever.

Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid. -John Wayne

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Considering it was $10 i figured what the hell. I have a growing collection of orphaned procs, mainly pentium1s. I also accept any and all pcs people are tossing. A friend was going to toss his a Cyrix and p3 1ghz machine but I took them. Another was tossing a amd k5, 2 486s, 1 p233 and a p2 233. Took them all in. Unfortunately 1 486 was DOA and the other won't display any video but it will beep out post code if you take the ram out. The k5 died after a while, I'm not sure why. At first it worked fine after I put a heatsink and fan on it. Then it wouldn't put out any video and it only beeped. Then it would beep with or without ram in the same exact fashion. Eventually it flat out died. Still have the entire system in case I find a compatible mobo.

Something else I don't get.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_DOS_Comparison

On that DOS5.0 is complete missing. Other than a timeline reference its not there. Wonder why. It was what was originally on the 286.

Sorry to bump this but new information surfaced. It does indeed have a built in primitive bios accessable by hitting ctrl+alt+esc. I can set a 5.25" 360k, 1.2mb, 3.5" 720k and 1.44mb. No matter what drive combo I use in the bios and drive it refuses to boot from floppy. The drive light doesn't even turn on. Theres no setting in the bios to select boot order either. SOL I suppose.

So you are trying to boot from a 5.25in disk?. have you tried only one drive on the cable?
it should be at the very end and make sure the terminator jumper is in place.
also, is the floppy drive running from the same cfontroller card as the HDD?. if so try another port or a different card if you can, i had the same problem with my 286 and it finally booted DOS5.
I can get you the disks for 1.44MB dos5 or 1.2MB as well. let me know.
(original ofcourse ;P)

Both the hdd and floppy run from the onboard controller. I don't even know if it has a terminator jumper, but it's the only drive on the floppy chain. I haven't been able to find dos5 disks or images or anything anywhere. It's almost like the damn stuff dissappeared off the face of the planet aside from oem installs.

Quick follow-up, I poped in an old ISA controller board, it flashed the drive like normal, posted, and said cannot boot dos. Exactly whats it's been doing since I formatted it. Popped the cable back onto the onboard, no more light. Check the connections, turned out it was installed backwards. Still no boot though.

you failed to mention the type of drive you are installing IDE / MFM etc. It may also be that your AMD box bios was set for LBA or another setting the original bios will not understand.

Can you access the bios? The act of installing a floppy in any form 3.5 l/h or 5/14 l/h will not install it into the bios (ie allow it to work).

The floppies themselves were formated on one or both sides for the l/h density and at different speeds (5/14) which make the disk somewhat incompatable. The structure of the format was top then bottom. This required two read/write heads which the 360's and 720's lacked. The 1.2 meg drives quadded the information on the disk to 1.2 meg. to do this the tracks were reduced in width to accomodate 50% more tracks and inter track space, This required a much narrower head, and they wrote with lower intensity. This narrower track, different drive speed, and reduced magnetic flux makes a disk written on a 1.2 even as a 360 difficult at best for a real 360 to read and that was when they were new.

As to the hd. You will need to search the drive you are attpting to install, get all the specs on the drive ( ie heads, sectors etc) as none of the 286 machines would auto set the drive paramerters.

As silly as it may seem, these older machines needed the bios battery much more than a modern motherboard. New motherboads can auto configure most of their resources and the machine will boot, NOT the 286. You may as well need a bios config disk for this model to change the bios settings.

Ahh! but you cant boot. I would start with a full height 360 or a known to be 360 and a disk formated on a 360 to boot the system into the bios, and make sure the bios information saves (battery is still holding a
charge). You will then see the HD choices or the USER HD config, which will require the drive information, as to pre-comp, sectors, heads etc.

Your system thinks it is booting off a 10 meg MFM drive, and a 360 floppy.

Good luck.