Omnibook 430- Other Operating Systems

[matthiaspaul]

(01-07-2017 02:44 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  If any of you guys with a 430 is really hard up for entertainment, I'd be curious to know if that model has the same problem running a stock 3.1 installation in 386-enhanced mode.

I agree. It would be really useful to know, if all this is working fine on the 430. If it doesn't, there's little point trying to get it running on the 300, but knowing that it works on the newer model this model's configuration would be very good starting point trying to isolate the problems and derive a working configuration on the 300.

Quote:I did a fresh installation of Windows with it disabled, and it hangs a few seconds after startup. Disabling advanced power management corrects the problem, but isn't a viable way to run the system.

Before being able to track down power management issues, you need to know that the system is otherwise in a reliably working state and all other issues have been resolved. Therefore I suggest to disable advanced power management for a while.

Quote:Or possibly go back to DOS 6.20, since that's apparently what the 430 shipped with.

Generic issues of MS-DOS 6.22 and 6.20 are almost identical (except for DriveSpace vs. DoubleSpace). So, unless the kernel files were altered by HP, there's little point switching to 6.20. The HP-specific files all seem to be prefixed with "OB".

Not as a solution, but as temporary tests to isolate problems I would suggest that you try to rule out any possible disk DMA problems, upper memory address conflicts and miscommunication between the DOS and Windows memory managers. Once you have found a 100% stable configuration, these settings can
be tuned as well.

- disable (U)DMA modes in BIOS setup (because they could cause problems in V86 mode), or increase DMA size in SYSTEM.INI [386Enh] f.e. HardDiskDMABuffer=32 DMABufferSize=64
- disable multi-sector disk access in BIOS and CONFIG.SYS MULTITRACK=OFF
- experiment if changing the STACKS directive in CONFIG.SYS has an impact on stability, f.e. STACKS=16,512 or STACKS=0,0
- don't attempt to load anything high or into UMBs (CONFIG.SYS DOS=NOUMB, LOW)
- try loading HIMEM without EMM386 and loading both at the same time (but without declaring EMS or UMBs).
- dito, but explicitly exclude all upper memory (X=C800-FFFF)
- dito, but doing the same through SYSTEM.INI [386Enh] EMMExclude=C800-FFFF

Hope it helps,

Matthias