Anyone know how to boot a PC motherboard from a ROM (not a N

[steve mew]

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

 

[Mike Engelhardt]

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

 

[Chaos Master]

I found ancient runes from steve mew[mewsteve@hotmail.com] 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.

--
'You receive a scroll of signature. It says:'
Chaos MasterŽ - Posting from Porto Alegre - Brazil.
Remove the SPAM-KNIFE from the e-mail address to reply.

 

[Dr. Anton Squeegee]

In article <2_Atb.43578$n6.12148@nwrddc03.gnilink.net>,
mewsteve@hotmail.com says...

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)

 

[Andrew Tweddle]

steve mew wrote:

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?

 

[Bob Stephens]

On 16 Nov 2003 02:39:00 GMT, Mike Engelhardt wrote:

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

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