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Intel D815E Celeron board & MS-Dos

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by erikdr 2 views

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My brand new D815E whitebox PC with Celeron 1.2 MHz works mostly fine. (Wow, very first motherboard with ALL integrated...). Windows 2000 AS okay, NetWare okay as soon as running with its own device drivers.

However MS-DOS applications (and NetWare install as long as it uses the DOS drivers for CD, keyboard etc.) have a serious problem: after 15-20 minutes of no keyboard activity, e.g. in an endlessly looping batchfile or at the end of a Ghost or DriveImage run, the machine hangs.

I suspect it's some kind of BIOS setting which the advanced OS's (Win and NW) tolerate but good old DOS 5 doesn't. And as this is a softwarelab machine which has to suffer regular cloning/imaging under DOS, it's not very nice...

One last hint:
The endless looping batch hangs the machine too (after 15 minutes), Ctrl-C does not work and neither do other keys, but when I touch the power-off button all of a sudden it rechecks the keyboard and reads the interruption!! (Usually too late, power off will continue, and this is no solution as what I'm worried about is a crash in the midst of DriveImage/Ghost and not in a batchfile...)

Any votes, things I can try out in the BIOS?

Tnx,

- The Netherlands

3 replies

by thechas

Hi Erik,

Start by disabling ALL power management power saving, standby, and shutdown events in BIOS settings.
You may also need to disable ACPI support for DOS to function properly.

Then, if you still have problems, shut off all power management functions from Control Panel \ Power Management.

We are fast approaching the point where new motherboards will no longer function in DOS. DOS nows nothing about AGP, UDMA, SerialATA, or other new chipset features from the past 7 years.

I have seen postings where Windows 95 will not install on a Pentium 4 system. It just cannot deal with the newer hardware.

Here is a link that might help you keep DOS running a bit longer.

http://www.drdos.org/

Chas

by erikdr

Thanks a lot for the direction, at least! Some side-effects prohibit me to test it thorougly for now, being
* Switching off ACPI from Windows is only possible through removing the complete Win driver. (And even then, no guarantee that it will not still keep its default behaviour when in DOS...)
* Machine now switched to a too quick POST and is difficult to get into setup.
However direction is plausible enough, tnx a lot...

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