Installing DOS without a floppy drive or port replicator

Introduction

The worst case we have to consider is that you've lost the installation of DOS on the 4MB flash drive, and want to restore it. In order to do this, you have to boot to a copy of the DOS you want, and transfer the system files across. This would mean making a PCMCIA or CompactFlash storage device bootable, copying the DOS installation image onto it, booting the PC110 from this, then installing to the 4MB flash drive.

(In the example below, a PCMCIA hard drive is used. If a CompactFlash card was used, you'd have to replace the references to start-up sequence entries of PCMCIA with HDD-2. I believe the comments on drive initialisation are only relevant to PCMCIA ATA devices.)

You need

1x PC110
1x PCMCIA hard drive
1x PC with PCMCIA slots and/or CompactFlash adapter, with the chosen version of DOS installed on the PC.

The Procedure

1. Enter Easy-Setup on the PC110 (<F1> at power-on).
2. Set the startup sequence to PCMCIA.
3. Insert the PCMCIA drive into the other PC, format it, and transfer the DOS boot files to the drive.
4. Reboot the PC110 with the PCMCIA drive in place, confirm that it boots the chosen version of DOS. Since there is no AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS on the PCMCIA drive yet, it should ask for the time and date to be entered. If this does not happen - for instance you get an "I999..." error, a  "non system disk" error, or similar error message, confirm that the DOS boot files were transferred properly. If it is still not booting from the PCMCIA drive, you may need to initialise the PCMCIA drive again -

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Written by Daniel Basterfield. Images found on the internet. Enjoy!