[Coco] CoCo emulation on an IA-1 internet appliance

[Roger Taylor]

I was just about to give up on this week-long project when I might 
have gotten somewhere tonight?

The idea is to install MS-DOS on a 2-gig Compact Flash card so it 
boots up when inserted in the IA-1.  All along the IA booted up and 
kept reporting something to the extent of "Invalid or bad bootable 
partition".  Nothing I tried worked, and I've formatted that booger 
every which way possible, plus tried different parition types.

I am using my Linux laptop with a CF slot, running Fedora 7, to 
parition and format the CF.  Tonight I did an fdisk /dev/sdb and 
deleted the partitions, (w)rote it back, and rebooted, went back into 
fdisk, created a new MS-DOS parition (o), added a primary partition 
(n) (p) (1), then made sure the DOS compatibility flag was set, and 
the bootable flag was set.  I then set the (t)ype to FAT16, (w)rote 
it back to disk, then did a mkfs.msdos /dev/sdb1.  Now when I insert 
the CF in the IA-1 and boot it up, no warning message but the cursor 
just blinks in the upper left corner of the screen forever.

So I went back and changed the parition type to WIN95 FAT32, no 
dice.  Did a mkfs.msdos -v -F 32 /dev/sdb1, no dice.

I'm not an expert on fdisk or mkfs, and I just can't seem to create 
an MS-DOS bootable CF like so many others have done (although most 
claim to have gone through painful experiences).

Earlier today I first tried using my IDE to CF adaptor and attaching 
the CF as the primary slave HD on my old WIN95 box.  I formatted the 
CF with the checkboxes for creating an MS-DOS system disk, which DID 
put the files on the CF, but I still got the Bad bootable partition 
message on the IA-1.

Joe from this list sent me pics of his IA-1 running the Keil emulator 
just a day or maybe two after he received his IA-1 from an ebay 
win.  I'm going into my second week at this and it's driving me 
nuts.  :)  Any googling of the subjects turns up 90% cries and begs 
from others now and in the past trying to do the same or similar 
tasks like installing Windows 98, XP, etc. on a CF.  I'm just trying 
to put the basic MS-DOS system files and make it bootable, with no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and ofcourse I'll give credit 
to the people to help make it happen and mention it on the front page 
of the site where I posted the question, "can the webmaster turn this 
into a CoCo?"  :)  Apparently...... not in less than 2 weeks without 
some gurus stepping in.

I'll also put together a tutorial and play-by-play for anybody else 
wanting to do the same project once I learn what I'm doing wrong and 
some of the logic behind the partitioning scheme that "should" work 
since the IA-1 is just a computer.  The BIOS is set to boot from the CF, btw.