8086 Disk Manager

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tseng4
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri 22 Jun, 2018 2:19 pm

8086 Disk Manager

Post by tseng4 »

I setup 286 and 2GB storage drive. Ontrack disk manager is installed however 8088/8086 with XTIDE cant see the partition. I tried boot disk with disk manager installed on 8086 but it wont boot. Any suggestion?
BigAlUK
Posts: 40
Joined: Mon 15 Feb, 2016 8:27 pm

Re: 8086 Disk Manager

Post by BigAlUK »

From the info you have in your post, it sounds like you've created a HDD with a 286 under an appropriate DOS, and are now trying to use that in emulating what amounts to a much older machine. However, 2 GigaByte HDDs were unheard of when PCs still used 8088/8086 chips. If you are emulating a 5150-class PC, 10MBytes is the max, and a 5160 (PC-XT) it is 20MB to 32MB, depending on which DOS version you use. By the time you get to 5170 AT-class machines (where the 286 was the processor of choice), you would already be talking DOS 3.x or later, and 2GBytes comes into play AFTER that. The class of machine under emulation will be somewhat determined by what BIOS ROMs you are using and what processor is behind it. And then (but only then) does the DOS version come into play. Any other application depends upon all of these. The chances of a tool like Ontrack being appropriate for an 8088/8086 class machine are thus somewhat slim.

Forgive me if I have that wrong, but...
I think you need to look again at what you want to achieve, and then discover what tools "of the time" will help you. It took me a while to emulate an XT with HDD reasonably well, and I've yet to try going as far back as a 5150 PC with a 10MB drive in what would have (in the real world) been an IBM5161-001 expansion box. These things don't have shortcuts - the tools of the time are usually required to convince the BIOS and the DOS that the world they are booting into is "real". Setting up an emulation that may well have been valid for a machine in 1989 and then expecting an older BIOS ROM and DOS 2.0 from 1982 to work - well, good luck trying.
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