Some rights reserved! Vintage technology preserved.
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This beast survived nearly 30 years. This lifeform is a 80286 based portable. The restoration was pretty straightforward, except that it had been purchased with bad screen. After repairing, the only showstopper was that it basically handles only 2 types of IDE 3.5"(!) harddisks: 20MB and 40MB, the BIOS and/or the autodetection is set to the latter one. It does nothing with a winchester with other C/H/S parameters just truncates it to these 980/5/17 - the 40MB dimensions. Of course there wasn't around a harddisc with such parameters, so the laptop was fed with a 1011/15/22 160MB hdd.
Tried FreeDOS latest (v1.2) "manual install", which is nothing but invoking fdisk and format dos utilites. Used the floppy image ripped from the so-called legacy ISO image, and it seems that it has broken master boot code - cannot handle forced C/H/S values other than the default of the HDD. The MBR code had been replaced then with a custom code snippet that load only the first system boot sector, which parameters was hardcoded. Unfortunately, after the "..." FreeDOS prompt, it freezed.
Instead of making an Int 13H hook loaded from the first 17 sectors, gave up in order to waste around 75% of the HDD space and a bare MS DOS 6.22 "install" - using again fdisk and format only - worked as a charm. The final result is here:
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