regy106@canterbury.ac.nz (07/21/90)
Hi, I am having a problem booting up XT's on a diskette. The XT's hard disk has been formatted with IBM 3.1 . They boot up on the hard disk and perform o.k. When I boot up on the floppy with an IBM 3.1 diskette (or for that matter msdos 3.21, msdos 3.3), it boots o.k., will see the hard drive but when you DIR C: it reports: file not found. We have at least 4 machines acting this way. We have another machine formated with IBM 3.1 that works o.k i.e. shows the root directory when booted on a:. These 5 machines are relatively old with 1985 BIOS's. The one that works has the same BIOS as one of the one's that doesn't work. All machines have 20M hard disks. I compared (using PCTOOLS) the two system hidden files and command.com, there was no differences. The partition table looks o.k. The boot sector looks o.k. I have checked for viruses. If you boot up on A: (on a problem machine) change to C: make a sub-directory then look for that directory entry, you find it at sector 70, which is in the middle of the second fat. A way to solve my problem is to reformat the hard drive with msdos 3.3, but I would like to know what is causing the problem. Thanks for any help. John Edwards You can mail me on REGY106@CANTERBURY.AC.NZ