Since the last report, I obtained the floppy drive and an SD card adapter. At
first I was disappointed to find that both a 32 GB and 2 GB SD card produced
errors during the self-test. I don't know the meaning of the errors but one of
them was error code 01, and I believe the other one was 27.
First, I received the SD to IDE adapter. I had not yet received the 2 GB card,
but I had a 32 GB card already so I decided to try that, just in case. I tried
installing NetBSD to the 32 GB card in a virtual machine as before, and this
time I was successfully able to reboot the VM from the SD card, unlike the CF
card. However, the laptop still would not boot from it.
Next, I received the floppy disk drive and 2 GB SD card. I swapped the floppy
drive with the CD drive, and the 2 GB card with the 32 GB card. The SD card
still caused the above mentioned error, though I don't remember which code went
with which card. However, now that I had a floppy drive, I decided to try
installing MS-DOS anyway. I used my early 2000s PC to write the three required
disks for installation, and sure enough, I was able to install it to the SD
card and boot with no problems.
So, despite producing some kind of error in the self tests, obviously the
machine can boot from the 2 GB card. This gives me hope that I may be able to
install NetBSD to the SD card. The first way I will try is installing NetBSD
onto it using real hardware instead of a VM. I'll take the current SD card out
of the 2000s PC and put the 2 GB card in, and install via the CD drive on that
machine.
If that doesn't work, I think there may be a way to boot CDs directly from DOS.
I've never heard of such a thing, but it seems like it should be possible to
me. I have experience writing simple ATAPI drivers for 32 bit machines like
this one, so if a utility doesn't already exist, I may resurrect some of my old
assembly code and use it to manually load the bootloader to the right place in
memory, and then just jump there and see what happens.
Overall this has been a short report, since a lot has happened since the last
one and I don't remember all of it. But, the short of it is that I now have a
floppy drive and a working, bootable SD card with DOS installed. There are two
potential ways I might be able to install a more capable OS, which I will
explore and write about for the next time.
