I decide that doing DOS development means I need a real computer, rather than an emulator. I have an old laptop, surely making it run DOS can’t be that hard, right?
The device in question is this. It’s an IBM ThinkPad R60e. It says IBM on the lid, it says IBM in the BIOS, but it also says Lenovo on it. I have no idea, I think it was made in that weird time before Lenovo completely took over the IBM branding.
You can see it clearly meets all the asethetic requirements for being a DOS laptop – a 5:4 aspect ratio screen, chunky screen bezel, says IBM on it, looks like you could use it as a weapon.
Minor issue… It’s actually quite modern, as far as laptops go.
A 1.6GHz Centrino and 1GB of RAM, with a date of 2006 is probably a bit too much for DOS really. It’s a Windows XP computer really.
And it really didn’t want to run DOS at all. MS-DOS wouldn’t install because it comes on floppy disks, and this laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive. And bootable DOS USB drives aren’t a thing.
FreeDOS did install, it’s a bit more smart. Fortunately the BIOS in the laptop exposes the SATA drive as something DOS can understand, so it didn’t do the comical thing of booting off USB, then failing to find any storage devices.
The problems came when I tried to install it. Due to a mixup with how FreeDOS sees drives, I accidentally thought the C: drive visible in FreeDOS was the laptop’s hard drive – it isn’t it’s the USB drive – and I accidentally wiped that using fdisk. Which thoroughly broke the installer.
Eventually I got a grip and installed FreeDOS. The big problem with using DOS is that it has no clue what USB is. The USB stick worked for the installer because the BIOS made it available to DOS as a boot drive.
Booting FreeDOS off the hard drive and putting a USB stick in didn’t do anything. To get files into the machine I was stuck with needing to copy them to the FreeDOS USB stick, booting off that, then copying them to the HDD and rebooting.
To lesson this irritating farce I decided I wanted Windows 3.11 because that has networking. Things were generally going OK until Windows announced it couldn’t find an SVGA display, so I had to make do with 16 colour VGA instead.
Any attempts at changing the screen resolution or adapter gave me weird “DOS Error” message boxes, which seem to be Windows 3.1’s way of saying “I don’t run in FreeDOS”. It seems to be a thing.
I figured for a laugh I’d try and make MS-DOS run on the laptop whether it liked it or not. My method was somewhat unconventional. If I got it working though, I might end up with MS-DOS, Windows 3.11 and networking all working find on this machine. I had to get MS-DOS on there somehow though, but it wouldn’t boot, so I couldn’t install it.
What even does it mean to install DOS on a computer anyway? Unlike more complex operating systems, there isn’t much to it. You need to put a bootloader into the hard disks’s master boot record, then make sure the base DOS files are on the drive – io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com. That’s it.
I found a link to a tool on some Microsoft Tech Community site explaining how to make a bootable USB stick for DOS, using a tool called RMPrepUSB. This did indeed make a bootable USB stick. It didn’t work with the DOS installation floppies, but that’s OK. We can do this by hand…
All you need to do is correctly partition the drive and format it for DOS, then from any random booting instance of MS-DOS just type
sys a: c:And that’s it. DOS is now installed on the hard drive. Windows happily installed (but still couldn’t see the SVGA card, I guess Lenovo/IBM didn’t properly emulate this).
For added fun I discovered Lenovo made DOS and Windows 3.11 drivers for the network card. They didn’t make drivers for anything else, just the network card. However they don’t actually work or install. But knowing the hardware was a “Broadcom NetXtreme” card lead me to a Dell website of all places with working drivers.
I couldn’t get SAMBA working, the old Windows 3.11 version is just too old now, and even enabling SMBV1 on my TrueNAS box didn’t make it work. Old Windows networking was really fussy anyway, so I gave up and used FTP instead, that worked well.
Is it worth it though? No. Not really. The laptop has no PS/2 ports, so I’m stuck using the nipple mouse which is a bit annoying. Also the battery in this laptop is dead so it’s not exactly the portable DOS development environment I was hoping for. Also I have no easy way to back the thing up, if the over 20 years old SATA drive dies, it’s gone. And using Windows 3 in 640×480 16 colour is a bit too retro for my liking.
I’m going to stick with using 86Box instead. It still has the same inherant problems for getting data in and out of it, but at least I can back up the entire drive image on my host PC.
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