gmcApr 2

Installing #FreeDOS on actual hardware (a 486dx40) and it's like watching paint dry. I had completely forgotten how slow things were back then :)

The first disk took the longest to process (about 20 minutes). After the second disk it started to pick up the pace, and have me changing disks every few minutes. I'm on disk 4 of 7 now. Fingers crossed it'll end up with a working installation!

Somehow it didn't want to see the entire 1GB CF card and only used half of it. I can live with that I believe.

@freedosproject

#RetroComputing #486

Show threadNazoApr 2

@gmc The hardware absolutely was painfully slow at times back then, but 20 minutes for extracting from one floppy is definitely excessive even if it was using a modern compression...

Maybe it needs smartdrv (or an equivalent.) You'd be surprised how much difference that makes on a period computer. The catch, of course, is one has to be absolutely sure it writes out its cache before shutting down or rebooting...

Show threadgmc
@nazokiyoubinbou I suspect it's the floppies slowing things down. I've had lots of fatal read errors, and of the 20 floppies I had only 7 managed to verify after I wrote the images to them. Of those 7, at least two failed to read during the install process. There's probsbly a lot of retries going on continuously.
Apr 3 at 4:44amWeb
Show threadNazoApr 4
@gmc That would absolutely do it alright...