IBM PC/XT 5160 Won't Boot

[blaklite]

Hello all.  I recently purchased an IBM 5160 PC/XT on eBay.  The person that shipped it may or may not have parked the hard drive first.  (I should have reminded him.)  Anyway, the first time I powered the system on, everything worked fine.  The computer came up in DOS.  The next time I powered on, the system did a floppy seek, then a single blink of the hard drive, and then a "Disk Boot Failure" message.

If I place a bootable floppy in the drive and reboot, the system will repeat the same procedure above except that instead of getting the "Disk Boot Failure" message, the floppy drive light will stay on for about 2 minutes and then turn off.  The screen only shows a blinking cursor.

I tried replacing the drive with another 360k drive and no luck.  I must admit that the only other DOS system I have is running DOS 7.1 and that's where the boot disk came from.  Is it possible that a bootable DOS 7.1 disk won't work on an XT?

As a diagnostic, I disconnected the floppy drive and hard drive and the system will boot into BASIC.  I'm not sure what else to check at this point.  Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[sirpaul484]

It's possible that a DOS 7.1 boot disk won't work on an XT.  I'd recommend trying a DOS 5.0-6.22 boot disk from http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm, and see if that would work.

Have you tried making sure the hard drive/disk drive cables were in properly? I'm sure you have, seeing as you disconnected them to check it out.  Just checking, in case you didn't.  :-)

[blaklite]

OK, sorry for the long delay in replying.

I finally managed to find a computer whose BIOS supports 360k drives.  I connected one of the 5160s 360k drives to the computer and made a DOS 3.3 boot disk.  I put that disk in the 5160 and lo and behold it booted to the floppy!  I was then able to browse the C: drive and everything seemed fine.  I ran Norton Disk Doctor and it found one bad sector in unused space, but other than that there were no problems.

I then tried a reboot without a floppy in the drive and the system just gave me "BOOT DISK ERROR".

Next I rebooted back to the floppy and typed "SYS C:".  The floppy did a couple seek operations and then the whole system hung.  So I rebooted with the floppy in the drive and got "BAD OR MISSING COMMAND INTERPRETER".  Ugh....so it seems that the SYS command somehow wiped my boot disk.  So I'm going to recreate another boot disk a try again.

I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks!

[blaklite]

So I had to create another boot disk a try again.

Now when I boot to the floppy and try the SYS command I get the message "NOT ENOUGH ROOM FOR SYSTEM FILES ON DESTINATION DISK".  I actually have about 15 megs free, but I'm guessing that's not what it's complaining about.  I then manually copied io.sys, msdos.sys, config.sys, and command.com to the drive.  After a reboot, no change...just a continuous floppy seek.

So it looks like I'm back to the drawing board.  Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[blaklite]

OK, I'm finally up and running.  It turns out that I had several floppy discs with bad sectors even though Norton couldn't detect the faulty sectors.  So many of the files I was copying were corrupted.  I'm now up and running with DOS 6.22 and everything is going well.  In fact I connected to the internet and have been rekindling my love of BBSs.  I'm using mTCP's Telnet for most of my browsing, but since it has no file transfer capability, I've been using Kermit when necessary.  Unfortunately, Kermit is incredibly slow for some reason with actual throughput of around 9600bps over ethernet.  I've tried tweaking a lot of the settings, but it doesn't seem to affect the actual speed.  Maybe it's just a code-heavy application.

Anyway, thank you all for your help.  I'm very happy with my new/old toy!

Thanks!

[sirpaul484]

Congrats! I'm glad everything's working out now.

And that, my friends... is why it is important to ignore that early 90s PSA, and copy that floppy.

[RedWolf]

Congrats! I'm glad everything's working out now.

And that, my friends... is why it is important to ignore that early 90s PSA, and copy that floppy.

Yes, please, copy that floppy.

By the way, Blaklite, if you're into BBSes, you should connect to mine: cavebbs.homeip.net port 23.

Hope to see you there soon.