So my friend has agreed to hand over his old 286 DOS laptop after owning it for more than 20 years!

How cool is that, i mean this is old school to the max.

This will look so good sitting next to my TI-80 =)

Theres only one problem... The OS will not boot, he cant get past the BIOS.

Do i need to write my own little OS to try to recover the files?

I would like to since there are a lot of cool home-made games on there.

What do i need to do to make this work?

Or is the data lost forever?

depend on the support, hard disk?

fat, not fat?

I have not yet gone to his house to pick it up.

Im going to get it this weekend =)

How can i tell if it is FAT or what support it has?

my friend gave me similar broken once. it had rom with ms dos and basic ms utils (eg. format, fdisk) - it may be attached as virtual read-only disk. beware - mine had virus on the rom disk!!! also there was 20M hdd - i have exchanged it to 4G hdd of usual size

Try Eric Auer's tiny WHICHFAT tool.

BTW, if it can't get past the BIOS, sounds like the HD is wearing out. (Or it could just be a software issue, but I kinda doubt it.)

Does it have a floppy drive? Try booting a FreeDOS image (e.g. my disk #2 here).

P.S. FASM can't (yet? heh) run on a 286, so you'll have to use something else like the old 16-bit NASM, Wolfware, ArrowASM, or similar. Also, don't forget Turbo C, Micro C, Dev86DOS, etc. etc. I've got links to all that here. Enjoy DOS!

P.P.S. Just FYI, you can also run Minix or ELKS on a 286 if you're so inclined.

I am pretty sure it does have a floppy drive.

I have downloaded 'disktwo.zip' as mentioned.

Now i will copy the image to a clean floppy.

Then i will boot the pc with this floppy and see what happens...

It would be so cool if i could recover the data.

Thanks for your replies and links.

Probably best to connect it with a long ribbon as the master on IDE2 to a more recent computer and then try and recover all the files/data to the newer IDE 1 master HDD.
Copy it all across.
A winME/Win98 desktop would be best IMO.
The main HDD would be the C drive and the Laptop would come up as the D drive.
If it works then drag the files/data across to the C drive.

I have an old 1gig connor HDD from about 1992 and it sounds pretty clunky even though it still works.

once the data is copied/transferred you can unplug the ribbon and run DOS stuff straight away on a Win95/ME desktop.

Only then I would try and recover the laptop HDD directly.

The chances of you getting an error with early operating systems is really high, I was always reformatting my HDD when things went tits up.

This maximises your chances of recovering the data before goofing about with the laptop OS.