![]() That’s it! As you can tell, restoring the Compaq Portable 386 is relatively straightforward if you’re even mildly tech-savvy- the components are pretty robust, and due to the price of the computer at the time, they were built to last. You should now be able to boot your Compaq Portable 386 to its hard disk MS-DOS prompt without needing the dos floppy. If, after MS-DOS installation, you get an error message such as “Operating system not found” or something similar, boot to your dos floppy and type “FDISK/MBR.” After executing FDISK/MBR, restart the computer once more. It seems this step may be necessary even after an MS-DOS installation else, you won’t get a hard disk command prompt. Once you have successfully installed MS-DOS, boot again from your dos boot disk, and then type FDISK /MBR at the command prompt – this adds the master boot record to your disk allowing your computer to boot from the CF card / hard disk directly. Follow the commands in FDISK to create your MSDOS partition(s) first (in case you want to set up multiple partitions or adjust their sizes), then restart and resume MS-DOS setup. Exit the setup program (press F3) and type FDISK at the command prompt, and press enter – if all is well, the FDISK program should load and give you a series of choices – press “4” to view the existing disk, partitions, and logical drives. I recommend exiting MS-DOS setup to check that the hard disks / compact flash cards are configured correctly. If you don’t have a setup disk and just used an MS-DOS boot disk, the computer should at least boot to command prompt, showing “A:/>”. After confirming the hard disks are correctly set up properly, restart the computer and insert an MS-DOS boot disk or MS-DOS install disk – if all went well in previous steps, the computer should boot from this disk, then automatically run MSDOS setup.The cool thing if you use Compaq MS-DOS, you get this amazing retro COMPAQ logo from the ’80s at boot. The set is made of 3 floppies and one with complementary stuff. Once you have your floppy disk, boot into the Compaq Diagnostics program to correctly set up the hard drive. ms-dos-6.2-v-japanese-setup-floppy-images Scanner Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.6.4. First of all, you will need to download the diskettes images of Ms-DOS. If you can’t make floppy disks, you can try to find the disks on eBay or leave a comment below, and I will try and help. If you are using a 3.25-inch disk, then you will need to use the 720k version. If you are using a 5 1/2 inch floppy drive, you will need to create the diagnostic disk using the 360K version. First, make sure you have set up the hard disk / CF card properly by installing the cables and providing power, then turn on the computer with the Compaq Portable Diagnostic Diskette in the floppy drive.I won’t go into too much detail on how to install MS-DOS you can find detailed step by step instructions here if you get stuck with my simplified instructions below: ![]() The Compaq MS-DOS does offer some unique features that allow you to manipulate how text is displayed through the MODE command, but at the end of the day, I found MS-DOS 6.22 more familiar and user friendly. ![]() When I restored my Compaq Portable 386, I found it was actually worthwhile to install the original Compaq MS-DOS 3.31 just to poke around. ![]()
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