So without a floppy drive on the Retro PC I had to find a way to get a bootable media on the machine.
I found in my stash a USB multi memory card reader. It’s design to be a internal device but since it’s a USB device by nature I just soldered on a USB A breakout and works as attended. So now I can use compact flash on my main PC.
Using Virt-Manager that is a KVM/QEMU front end I created a virtual machine and created a 500MB drive image. I was then able to install MS-DOS 6.22 via floppy images. After getting it booting in the VM I then used dd (Disk Dump) and wrote the image to the compact flash card.
From there I ran into some issues with the retro PC wanting to boot from the compact flash. With a old 3COM 10base-T card that has a PXE option ROM this gave enough delay or fresh look into finding a MBR on the compact flash. All I know is it works.
After dropping to a dos prompt I was able to tweak the system by running memmaker, defrag, and so on. After that I was able to hunt down the Sound Blaster AWE 64 DOS drivers, CD-ROM drivers and so on. Since I have this on a compact flash I just plugged it into my main PC and transferred the files over.
Ran memmaker again to move the drivers into upper memory to free up the conventional memory.
For giggles I created a boot menu in the config.sys and autoexec.bat to load system devices. Since I hardly would use the CD-ROM drive I have it as an option. The default is set to load up the audio and mouse drivers.
I think the Gotek I bought is faulty. I received a ISA IDE/Floppy/IO card and the system see’s the additional serial ports set to COM3 and COM4 but no floppy and if I try to access the floppy it fails. I guess I need to plug in the real floppy drive and do some testing. I know for sure the floppy controller on the motherboard is dead because when enabled I get a (C0) error.
Also the 3Com NIC doesn’t want to work on the system via packet driver. Until I can make a option ROM board I’m kinda stuck with the 3Com NIC.