Installing DOS 6.22 on a modern HDD/SSD?
Posted by nricotorres@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 9 comments
I have recovered my old PC clone 486 from ~1993, but the 1GB HDD is dead. Rather than pay through the nose to buy a replacement that will likely also die soon, how to best install DOS to a modern drive? Obviously this is an IDE system, so I'd either need an IDE drive or SATA adapter. I set this up about a decade ago with that 1GB drive, but I have loads of SATA 120GB drives. I realize it's a waste of most of the drive, but would I just format a FAT16 partition to 1GB and just install? I have my original installation discs, but wouldn't mind installing to the drive offline on a modern PC, then moving the drive to the old PC.
DrNick42@reddit
As others have said, CF card probably the best option so good choice. If you did want a real HDD in there in future for authenticity though, you can still get them dirt cheap on e-bay drives around 10GB for about £10.
nricotorres@reddit (OP)
I'll share that sentiment when I actually get it working! I'm more than willing to sacrifice authenticity in an old drive for the convenience and stability.
nricotorres@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the suggestions all, I'm going to get a 3.5" CF-IDE, a 512MB Transcend card, and a USB CF dongle.
EsoTechTrix@reddit
I've used the CF drive hack quite a bit. The best is you can the 'snapshot' a system as if pull the card, clone it, and then roll back to that as many times as you want. Great for testing old cards that you have to install drivers for without swiss cheesing Windows or DOS.
docshipley@reddit
Industrial grade Compact Flash and an IDE-CF adapter is my go-to for this.
A lot of consumer grade CF - camera media, etc - have the boot flag set false with no way to change it. Industrial-rated cards are almost always bootable. And just to make your life easier, check to see if the manufacture publishes a CHS geometry for the card.
schluesselkind@reddit
Never had any problems with consumer grade CF cards using gparted. My Atari computers take them and the few older PCs I have take them too
docshipley@reddit
Agreed, it's not universal. It is, however, a well-documented problem.
Terrible-Bear3883@reddit
As u/docshipley suggests, an IDE-CF adapter, I fitted quite a few for customers with old systems, we had one contract where the CF were pre-configured in our workshop, we just had to remove the old hard drive and connect the CF adapter, it took longer to drink the cup of tea and fill in the paperwork.
CobraG0318@reddit
As far as software...If installing win 9x, I'd target 95 osr 2.5 for the fat32 support. If dos/win3.x you could use dos 7.1 for fat32. There's community provided/assembled versions of it. Though I'll admit you may have to hunt down some programs like dosshell and others. The does 6.22 supplement will have a lot of those. If your bios won't see drives over a certain size, there's DDOs like ez-drive/ez-bios. If you're brave enough to be running Linux, it'll likely redetect the actual size of the drive, as long as it can access /boot.
As far as hardware, as ppl stated, cf-cards. Though you'll likely need an adapter to go from the 2.5" connector of the cf-card to the one of the standard 3.5" ide drive connector. Its passive and cheap. There's also a pata-sata adapter, which is also inexpensive, just make sure you're converting in the right direction. I'd say if you go that route, try and keep the sata drive small. You might can use a ddo and fat32 to make usable larger drives, but I'm sure there's a limit where things break still. But you might could put a small sata ssd in it. Tempting. And I think there's an ide adapter for using sd-cards, akin to the blueSCSI for SCSI systems, now but I forget the name.