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Anyone know how to boot a PC motherboard from a ROM (not a Netwrok Card Boot ROM) ?

S

steve mew

Jan 1, 1970
0
I am looking to convert an old 486 motherboard into something useful again.
I would like to remove the Harddisk and place just a DOS and a few utils
onto a ROM chip.
Anybody got any ideas ?

Thanks

s
 
M

Mike Engelhardt

Jan 1, 1970
0
Steve,
I am looking to convert an old 486 motherboard into something useful
again. I would like to remove the Harddisk and place just a DOS and
a few utils onto a ROM chip. Anybody got any ideas ?

You need to boot DOS, if for no other reason than to set
up the interrupt table. By far the easiest thing would
be to boot from a floppy if you don't want a harddisk.
Booting DOS from ROM has been done. There were laptops
in the early 80's that did that. But I never seen generic
BIOS's be able to do it. The easiest way to boot from
solid state would be a USB bootable drive an a very
modern motherboard that supports bootable USB in the
BIOS.

--Mike
 
C

Chaos Master

Jan 1, 1970
0
I found ancient runes from steve mew[[email protected]] in the floor of
sci.electronics.cad:
I am looking to convert an old 486 motherboard into something useful again.
I would like to remove the Harddisk and place just a DOS and a few utils
onto a ROM chip.
Anybody got any ideas ?

You need a ROM w/ MS-DOS to get an interrupt table. The easiest way would be
using RAMDRIVE.SYS in a bootdisk to create a 'fake' disk drive and copy
COMMAND.COM, MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS and other .sys/.exe files to it, then set COMSPEC
environment variable to point to the fake drive. Then you can just eject the
bootdisk and place a disk with your software. I've seen that done to boot older
versions of Windows that do not know about FAT32 and to run older DOS software.
 
D

Dr. Anton Squeegee

Jan 1, 1970
0
I am looking to convert an old 486 motherboard into something useful again.
I would like to remove the Harddisk and place just a DOS and a few utils
onto a ROM chip.
Anybody got any ideas ?

Your best bet is to get a small (32MB or so) solid-state disk
drive. You can get them with both IDE and SCSI interfaces.


--
Dr. Anton Squeegee, Director, Dutch Surrealist Plumbing Institute
(Known to some as Bruce Lane, KC7GR)
kyrrin a/t bluefeathertech d-o=t c&o&m
Motorola Radio Programming & Service Available -
http://www.bluefeathertech.com/rf.html
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" (Red Green)
 
A

Andrew Tweddle

Jan 1, 1970
0
steve said:
I am looking to convert an old 486 motherboard into something useful again.
I would like to remove the Harddisk and place just a DOS and a few utils
onto a ROM chip.
Anybody got any ideas ?

Thanks

s
IIRC their was a product called ROMDOS which does roughly what you want?
 
B

Bob Stephens

Jan 1, 1970
0
Steve,


You need to boot DOS, if for no other reason than to set
up the interrupt table. By far the easiest thing would
be to boot from a floppy if you don't want a harddisk.
Booting DOS from ROM has been done. There were laptops
in the early 80's that did that. But I never seen generic
BIOS's be able to do it. The easiest way to boot from
solid state would be a USB bootable drive an a very
modern motherboard that supports bootable USB in the
BIOS.

--Mike

Look in old issues of Midnight Engineering, Radio Electronics and the like.
At least as recently as 10 years ago there was a company selling DOS in
ROM.
The ads showed a guy looking bored, waiting for his computer to boot.
Sorry, don't remember the company name.

Bob Stephens
 
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