Omnibook 430- Other Operating Systems

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

I believe there are quite a few HP Omnibook 300/425/430 enthusiasts here. I have been playing around with them for many years, especially the 425/430. I found the model 300 to be limiting in that I couldn’t install other operating system on it.

For those that have the OB-430 or the OB-425 with a OB-430 System ROM card installed (and actually the 530 & 600), I have created images of a couple of fun operating systems to play with. These were created using WIN32 Disk Imager.

Image 1 – 32MB:
Two Partitions, first has MS-DOS 6.2 and the second has CP/M-86. The MS-DOS 6.2 is about 21MB in size and the CP/M-86 is 8 MB in size with four User areas. User 0: System Files & Utilities, User 1: Turbo Pascal, User 2: Wordstar, User 3: Games There are utilities included to copy files to/from MS-DOS/CPM.

Image 2 – 340MB:
Two Partitions, first has MS-DOS 3.3 and the second has Xenix System V 2.3.4. MS-DOS 3.3 is the last MS-DOS that Xenix 2.3.4 will recognize. So it is possible to copy to/from MS-DOS/Xenix.

The images can be restored to larger CF cards (sometimes) – for example, I have restored the 340MB Xenix to a 1 GB PNY CF Card and it worked fine. But the CP/M image restored to the same 1 GB PNY CF card would NOT boot. I could restore the 32MB CP/M to an old Lexar 64MB CF card and it did boot fine.

Note: These will NOT work with the OB-300, since it always boots from the System Rom card.

EDIT: These will NOT work with the OB-425. I just tested them on a OB-425 with the OB_425 rom card, and they do NOT work. I had forgotten that all my OB-425's have OB-430 system ROM cards in them, which make them the same as a OB-430. sorry for any confusion I may have created.

They will work on an OB-425 IF you have the OB-430 ROM system card installed in lieu of the OB-425 System Card.

Please email me if you wish a copy of either image. It’s fun playing with CP/M and Xenix on a small notebook.

Bill
Smithville, NJ