5260/100, boot from SD card.

[wunjee]

Good evening!

So, recently I pulled my old 5260/100 out of the garage. This was my first computer. My parents bought it for me when I was 13 for my birthday and I've held onto it all this time. It's got the full 64mb RAM and at some point we upgraded it to the 1.2TB HDD from the 800MB drive.

I was doing some research and saw that some are using IDE to SD readers to use an SD card as a boot device. I still have the original recovery CD for the machine but apparently the CDROM drive isn't working because a reboot+C never even spins up the disc, and it goes right to the flashing ? disk.

How can I write an OS to this SD card? Preferably from a Windows 10 device since my laptop has an SD reader. I'd like to run OS 8.6, but 7.5.5 or 7.5.3 would also be fine.

Thanks in advance, and I'm looking forward to whatever I can do with this old beast! It still holds a special place in my heart.

 

[wunjee]

Well, a bit of an update. I did get my CDROM working. Pulled it out and sprayed the contacts down with some alcohol and away it went. It's unfortunate how brittle the plastics are, though. You can't do much of anything without destroying something...

Anyway, when I boot off the system CD and launch Drive Setup to initialize the disk, I get an "Initialization Failed" error. With both a 32gb SD card and an 8gb SD card.

 

[Amethyst1]

Anyway, when I boot off the system CD and launch Drive Setup to initialize the disk, I get an "Initialization Failed" error. With both a 32gb SD card and an 8gb SD card.

Do you have a smaller SD card, say 2 GB, to try? Does the adapter — can you provide a link? — have a Master/Slave/CableSelect setting?

 

[wunjee]

This is the SD card reader I bought. I don't have a smaller card but I may see if I can pick one up tonight, maybe one that's not SDHC, if that makes a difference at all.

I don't think the adapter has any master/slave settings. It doesn't have any jumpers. Drive Setup sees it, it just refuses to initialize it.

Edit:

I did some reading. Apparently the device is set to Master and cannot be changed, so on this early IDE without the ability to cable select it should be just fine. I haven't had a chance to try standard SD card yet. Oddly, I booted up the Mac to try again tonight and it saw the card as a 32mb disk instead of 8gb.. First time that's happened.

 

[wunjee]

I eventually got it to work. The Disk Setup on the 7.5.3 disk is apparently kind of crap. So I found and burned an OS 8.6 disk, using this image and it booted right up, saw the SD card, formatted it into 2 partitions (one being 2GB) and installed 8.6 on that partition with no problem at all.

8.6 is a little bit slow on a 5260/100, even capped out at 64MB RAM, but it's just good to have it working again. I reinstalled AOL 4.0 and my childhood came back to me. LOL..

I love this rig so much. I just wish the plastics weren't so fragile. Now to figure out how to get it on the internet...!