And in addition to finding a working MFM drive, it may be that there's only certain ones that work with that machine. Early 8088/8086 machines were notoriously picky about the hard disks they supported. You may be better off just running off the floppies. I've got tons of 360K & 1.2M floppies, but they've been in storage so long I couldn't be sure how many could be reformatted...

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I have very little DOS knowledge. I know basic commands and so on but very little about 8088 hardware. I know a lot about Apple II hardware (which won't help me in this case). So where would be the best place to find DOS disks?

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If it takes a 20 meg drive it's going to be a Type 2 drive you need. Those were the standard back then. I don't think the equity had on-board controllers so you'd need an MFM card too to connect the drive, as well as data cables. You should probably open it up and see what's there. 8088 hardware is hard to come by now and people that sell it know that. You should check garage sales and places like goodwill. Those are the only places you're likely to find that stuff cheap. As I mentioned above, either ebay or a google search for image files for dos OS disks. That should take a 720K 3.5 drive. That too would be hard to find but it'd be twice the capacity of a 360K.

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But once I found the disk images how would I make the disk? That's my problem. I looked on eBay for DOS 5 1/4 disks but couldn't find any. Would it be possible to find an external drive? It as a 25pin (not sure on that) serial port on the back. Also I assume that the proper printer drivers are on the original Epson disks. I can't remember the printer model off the top of my head. The printer is not my biggest concern right now though.

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As DAVE mentioned, you'll need an internal 20MB (type 2) drive. The technology for external hard drives (as in what we think of today for external drives) didn't exist, so the serial port was designed for just that, serial communications (to a modem, serial printer, etc.) If you're not that experienced with hardware (and you really want to put effort into repairing the machine) then I'd strongly advise you taking the machine to someone who is, otherwise you could make it into a large doorstop...

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I know my way around in the computer world. I can manage to make this system into a usable one. I didn't say I wasn't experienced with the hardware I said I wasn't experienced with the 8088 type hardware. http://picasaweb.google.com/mjauthe... thats a link to a picture of a port I found inside on the MOBO. I know its kind of hard to see it was hard to get a good shot of it but their it is. I'm sure I could do what ever I need to to get this thing running. Actually all I need is DOS disks to make it run. I just got to find some.

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You may not find image files for 360K disks. What you'd have to do is download whatever you find and extract it to whatever disks the download was designed for. Then boot up a PC with the extracted downloaded disk, put the 360 K disk in the 360K drive--say drive B:--and at the dos prompt type SYS B: and enter. That will transfer the system files to your 360K disk so it's bootable. Then you'd copy the files from the downloaded disk to your 360K disk. When the disk fills up you'd get another 360K disk and copy some more of the files. The older the dos version the fewer disks you will need. My dos 3.3 took up two 360 K disks. Dos 6.22 may take five or six disks. You should go no lower than 3.2 with a 20 meg drive. But to do all this you're going to need a 360 K drive in a second computer. Your best bet would be find the disks themselves on ebay or someplace similar. Then you wouldn't need a second computer to extract any images. You might want to check bootdisk.com and see what they have in dos system disks. They won't contain the dos files but will have the system files to make a disk bootable. Now, the download disk may have compressed files designed to be part of the OS installation, rather than working files you'd use if you didn't have a hard drive. To uncompress those files to make a working disk you use the EXPAND command which will be one of the files in the download. Another option is to find an 8-bit floppy card with it's own bios that will allow you to use higher density drives--1.2 and 1.44. That will work as long as the Equity doesn't have an on-board floppy controller. But again that's going to be more hardware that's hard to find. If you can't find what you need I'll see if I can find my old dos 3.3 disks. I don't have a PC set up right now with a 5.25 drive so even if I found them I'd have to put something together to copy them off.

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I think that the floppy controller is on board. I don't have a way to create them. That's the problem I keep running into. It ws interesting to see it when I opened it up how all the different components came together to make it work. If I can't find disks then maybe it will just be a display piece. It works, it just doesn't have an OS. I can do whatever hardware things that need to get done, I just need to find the hardware/software. Any other OSes I can run on it that would be easier to find like CP/M?

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Here's some old DOS versions supposedly for sale. http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/msdos... The documentation I read in the product support bulletins referred to DOS 2.11 several times for the Equity I but I found nothing to say 2.11 was an OS (if any) that shipped with the machine. Like Dave, I don't have a machine that I can use to make 360K floppies. Using 1.2M drives to make 360k floppies will sometimes work; sometimes it won't. Regardless, there are some "if's" to deal with; you need to find out if both the floppy drives you have will work, if you can find a suitable hdd controller card and hdd, or if you can really buy a 360k version of DOS 2.x or 3.x. Frankly, I wouldn't be willing to spend $50-100 for an old version of DOS just to find out the 360k drives wouldn't work or need adjustment. I understand CP/M would work too, but I remember trying to use it about 15 years ago...it was not very user friendly. Naw, it was a bitch. My 8088 had a hdd, 1.4Mb 3.5" floppy, and 1024k memory so I installed DOS 6.22 and it worked like a champ. I haven't looked at CP/M since. Any DOS like OS or 360k boot disk would serve to determine if the floppy drives still work. Skip

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I couldn't find my original 3.3 disks but did find 3.3 files I must have copied off systems I got at auction. One was from a Zenith PC another from AST. Mine were Packard Bell. It doesn't really matter as the basic files are the same but sometimes a manufacturer would add some files of their own. I dug out my old 8088 finally got it going. It's got 1.2 and 1.44 drives. I'll see if I can find a 360 drive and make some 3.3 disks. If I don't have a 360 it'll probably work OK with the 1.2. When a 1.2 formats a disk as 360 it lays down narrower tracks than when it's formatted in a 360 drive and, as Skip mentioned, sometimes a 360 drive has problems reading that disk. But I should be able to put together some 3.3 disks for you.

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OK well I found a copy of DOS 3.1 from a friend. He loaned me his backup and as far as I know, both disk drives work. I did not have enough ram to run the original Sim City (needs 512k I have 256K) and I don't know if it works on a monochrome screen. I could see the contents of the Sim City disk when I put it in the second drive. So both drives appear to be working ok, so thats good.

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"So both drives appear to be working ok, so thats good." That's nearly a miracle. Glad you found some disks to try; let us know how it works out. Skip

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