Boot MS-DOS 6.22 from PCMCIA Compact Flash card.

[ppgrainbow]

Hi all! It's been a while since I posted anything new here.

I'm trying to find ways to boot MS-DOS 6.22 from a 2 GB Compact Flash card connected to a PCMCIA adapter on the Toshiba Tecra 720CDT laptop and so far, no such luck.

The BIOS has no support for booting from PCMCIA, so I'm gonna have to find ways how to get around it without running into difficulty. And doing a search for booting from PCMCIA or from a CF card connected to a PCMCIA adapter yielded little or no help at all.

The unit has two PCMCIA slots and I recently had both the hard drive upgraded and maxed out the RAM, by the way. And looking at the PC card (PCMCIA) properties, the IBM TravelStar 8E hard drive (Drive D:) is on Socket 1 (bottom) and the 2 GB CF card (Drive E:) is on Socket 2 (top).

While Windows 95 OSR2 does recognise the PCMCIA devices on the fly, when rebooting into MS-DOS mode (MS-DOS 7.1), it doesn't even recongise it at all.

How can I get the PCMCIA devices recognised in MS-DOS mode and how can I find ways to successfully boot to the compact flash card on Socket 2 when the BIOS doesn't support it?

Thanks!

[dencorso]

Plop bootmanager.

[ppgrainbow]

Plop bootmanager.

Tried Plop Boot Manager and it didn't even recongise the PCMCIA devices (compact flash drive and external hard disk) from DOS. When I messed around with the program, it destroyed all of the data on the internal hard drive. I had to start over as a result of this.

If I want to use Plop Boot Manager to try to boot off of the PCMCIA compact flash drive when the BIOS won't even allow it, how can this be done?

[dencorso]

Sorry about that!

I've been using Plop 5.0 since incept time, and it never gave me grief.

Since last year I'm using 5.0.13 to boot from USB pendrives in machine which BIOS don't support it.

However, the first version to support PCMCIA is 5.0.14, which I've not yet tested.

You might report your experience directly to Elmar Hanlhofer, he is very nice and much helpful.

[ppgrainbow]

Sorry about that!

I've been using Plop 5.0 since incept time, and it never gave me grief.

Since last year I'm using 5.0.13 to boot from USB pendrives in machine which BIOS don't support it.

However, the first version to support PCMCIA is 5.0.14, which I've not yet tested.

You might report your experience directly to Elmar Hanlhofer, he is very nice and much helpful.

Thanks for the help. Does Elmar's website has a forum where users can report their experience with booting from compact flash drives connected to a PCMCIA slot?

I'm totally new to using Plop Boot Manager, so I'm going to be using this feature at my own risk as it is strongly possible to lose data if misused.

Edited February 28, 2012 by ppgrainbow

[jaclaz]

Thanks for the help. Does Elmar's website has a forum where users can report their experience with booting from PCMCIA-based compact flash drives?

Sure :

http://www.plop.at/

http://forum.plop.at/

jaclaz

[ppgrainbow]

Thanks for the help. Does Elmar's website has a forum where users can report their experience with booting from PCMCIA-based compact flash drives?

Sure :

http://www.plop.at/

http://forum.plop.at/

jaclaz

Thanks again. I found this page regarding the discussion of attempting to boot from a PCMCIA-based compact flash drive: http://forum.plop.at/index.php/topic,313.0.html

Unfortunately, it only dealt with attempting to boot lightweight Linux distros such as DSL and Plop Linux and it wasn't much a help. I'll try to ask Elmar to see whatever it's possible to boot from a PCMCIA card as it as MS-DOS 6.22 installed on it.

Edited February 28, 2012 by ppgrainbow

[jaclaz]

Thanks again. I found this page regarding the discussion of attempting to boot from a PCMCIA-based compact flash drive: http://forum.plop.at/index.php/topic,313.0.html

Unfortunately, it only dealt with attempting to boot lightweight Linux distros such as DSL and Plop Linux and it wasn't much a help. I'll try to ask Elmar to see whatever it's possible to boot from a PCMCIA card as it as MS-DOS 6.22 installed on it.

If I may you have TWO separate questions/problems:

1. boot from the PCMCIA (or CardBus)?
   
2. access contents of the card from "pure" MS-DOS
   

The second (only) may be solved through DOS drivers.

Finding dos drivers that work on your particular hardware may be dufficult, but it could be doable.

You may find of interest:

http://www.quatech.com/support/pdf/pcmcia_for_dos.pdf

http://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/systemsoft

http://www.tssc.de/index.htm#

http://www.cer.com/pages/products/prod_faq_answ.php?faq_id=24

http://www.mail-archive.com/arachne@arachne.cz/msg20538.html

http://wayback.archive.org/web/19980715000000*/http://www.datorintensiven.se/dinew/drivers/iqnote/cardwiz.zip

http://www.oldjake.co.uk/progs/cardwiz.zip

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=DSHY-3NPU8M

It greatly dpends on your hardware, chipset used, etc. ec, and some tweaking may be required anyway, since your hardware loks like "not so easy" one:

http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/HyperNews/get/pcmcia/toshiba.html?inline=-1

jaclaz

[ppgrainbow]

Thanks again. I found this page regarding the discussion of attempting to boot from a PCMCIA-based compact flash drive: http://forum.plop.at/index.php/topic,313.0.html

Unfortunately, it only dealt with attempting to boot lightweight Linux distros such as DSL and Plop Linux and it wasn't much a help. I'll try to ask Elmar to see whatever it's possible to boot from a PCMCIA card as it as MS-DOS 6.22 installed on it.

If I may you have TWO separate questions/problems:

1. boot from the PCMCIA (or CardBus)?
   
2. access contents of the card from "pure" MS-DOS
   

The second (only) may be solved through DOS drivers.

Finding dos drivers that work on your particular hardware may be dufficult, but it could be doable.

You may find of interest:

http://www.quatech.com/support/pdf/pcmcia_for_dos.pdf

http://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/systemsoft

http://www.tssc.de/index.htm#

http://www.cer.com/pages/products/prod_faq_answ.php?faq_id=24

http://www.mail-archive.com/arachne@arachne.cz/msg20538.html

http://wayback.archive.org/web/19980715000000*/http://www.datorintensiven.se/dinew/drivers/iqnote/cardwiz.zip

http://www.oldjake.co.uk/progs/cardwiz.zip

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=DSHY-3NPU8M

It greatly dpends on your hardware, chipset used, etc. ec, and some tweaking may be required anyway, since your hardware loks like "not so easy" one:

http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/HyperNews/get/pcmcia/toshiba.html?inline=-1

jaclaz

Thanks for the help. As for the chipset used, I'm gonna go back into Windows for a brief moment to determine which chipset the Tecra 720CDT laptop uses.

In the meantime, I went ahead and installed the Card Wizard services and I put the following lines in the CONFIG.SYS:

devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\sscirrus.exe /skt:2
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\cs.exe /poll:1
device=c:\cardsoft\csalloc.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\atadrv.exe /s:2
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mti1.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mti2p.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mtaa.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mtab.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mtatm.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mthb2.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mtsram.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\mtddrv.exe
devicehigh=c:\cardsoft\cardid.exe

The services started successfully, but when I tried to access the 2 GB flash drive on socket 2, I wound up getting this error message:

Not ready reading drive D:

Abort, Retry, Fail?

Additionally, installing the card services consumed a whopping 122 KB of base memory, reducing the available memory to 498 KB! Ouch!

How can I fix this and reduce memory consumption for installing the card services under DOS 7.1?

By the way, I'm still waiting on Elmar to approve my account...

Edit: I would like to update that I tended to post at that forum, but I never had the time to post anything and as a result, my account got disabled.

Edited March 28, 2012 by ppgrainbow