Yak shaving level: trying to get DR-DOS 7 to mount a FAT32 partition. It can create them but can't read them. There's a semi-official driver called DRFAT32 but it complains about the filesystem being improperly aligned.

Might just have to make four FAT16 partitions and call it good.

Hmm... it works if I create the FAT32 partition with Win98 `fdisk`. Not yet sure if it's because it's now a "logical" partition instead of a "primary", or because it's positioned differently on the disk. Further experimentation is called for.

Cool it works in any case!

dd'd the disk image to a CF card and got it going on hardware. It's more stable on the real metal; stuff that crashed on 86Box works fine here.

Next up is getting the Zip drive and 3dfx cards going, but I don't expect any difficulty.

Hmm, guess not. I've got a couple Intel Pro/100's, another 3c905 (like the one I'm using now), and a 3c595. That and a few ISA cards but there's no room for them in this rig.

I took one of the Intels out, might try it later.

No luck with the Intel card either. 😑 At least the driver doesn't completely hang the machine like the 3Com one did, but I'm still not getting any traffic in or out.

Can't rule out a compatibility issue with DR-DOS yet though; I'll have to retry it with MS-DOS later.

If THAT doesn't work, I'll see about grabbing an RTL8139 card off Feebay. Probably won't get anything I order now until after DOSember, but I wanna get online from DOS damnit!