Question DOS hard drive setup

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Aug 19, 2021
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Greeting from Packerland.

I have been hired by a company to resurrect an old machine tool (CMM). The control is a 486 clone, Mom-B is MV035 Opti. It has no monitor, keyboard or floppy and when running correctly one simply turns on the power and 10 seconds later a lone LED flashes on one of the manufacturers boards. I have no reason to believe that the MFG boards are bad but removed them anyway. I have managed to get a monitor and keyboard and floppy active and I know it was running MSDOS 5, the hard drive has the operating files on it and judging by the files in a sister drive there is every reason to believe these files are good. I have been running 6.22 from a floppy with good results.

The issue I am having is with the hard drives of which there are 3. I have looked at the original SSD with a Laptop and saved the files. On the 486 MB C: says “invalid drive spec”. FDISK(4) indicates 1 patrician Status A and 4MB, I believe my laptop reveals it is running FAT.

The sister SSD actually could load DOS when we first started, it has since refused to boot. C: DIR indicates a “file (32) missing op sys” . Patrician C: 1, Status A, Type PriPos, Volume B, 4MB, Fat 12 .

Both drives were sent to a data recovery outfit who made a CF drive with oddly a combination of files from both SSDs and a few I don't recall ever seeing. It never booted. I ran it through FDISK than formatted it and finally C:sys. Files are there as well as patricians but when booted it responds “missing operating system”

The preferred option is to get the original running to see how the CMM system reacts. I have not been willing to do anything to it other than exercise option 4 on FDISK. Of course any of the other two drives is a good thing too.
 
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