Setting up an IBM PC 110 for WiFi from MS-DOS

yep, you read that correctly, I'm going to document the steps I've taken in order to create a "from scratch" IBM PC 100, setup the config, install MS-DOS, create a bootable CF Card, configure the WiFi card for usage and access the internet from MS-DOS.

btw - these are the dimensions of the IBM PC 110, that's pretty small:

158 mm x 113 mm x 33 mm (HxWxD)

BTW - I have also performed that same steps on my trusty old Gateway 2000 Handbook 486 and it works great - I did however use the same WiFi card, so your mileage may vary if you are using a different Wifi card and packet drivers.

Right, let's start at the start with a "fresh" IBM PC 100 device.

First of all I'm going to assume that the LCD screen is broken!  If so, I know a very smart chap, called Kevin Moonlight, who has been working very hard during the Covid-19 lockdown to develop and create his own custom adapter so that you can use a new 5" TFT screen in your device.  He is awesome for doing this and will be breathing new life into the 3-4 devices I have that have faulty screens.

I'm also going to assume that you have a docking station that works (I do have one device that doesn't play ball with any of the 4 docking stations that I have, so I cannot hook it up to an external monitor).

Right, upon booting up, you'll likely get CMOS battery fault errors displayed, keep pressing enter a few times, you'll see it'll want to set the date to '1994', yep, keep pressing enter... then the device is likely to boot into the internal 4MB that may or may not have a PC-DOS installed.  If it does, it's likely to be in Japanese, so you may or may not know what's going on in the UI.  The thing to do here is, press the reboot slider button on the far left of the device and press and hold the [F1] key, you'll see the RAM output to the screen, keep it pressed....and then it should change to the SETUP screen.  If it doesn't do this for you, you may have to press [Fn][F1] (I had one device, before it died where I had to do that, so YMMV).

I found that if I had an external keyboard attached pressing the [F1] key was ignored, so you'll need to unplug that and use the device keyboard.

You will be presented with a lovely screen.  As we're going to do this from scratch, we'll set this up to boot from the external floppy disk and we shall be placing the CF Card into a PCMCIA adapter (top slot) for configuration and then after we've done what is needed, we'll come back and change the setup.

Now, we're going to assume that you also have the external 3.5" Floppy disk drive, a floppy disk that has already been setup to boot to MS-DOS with some minimum files made available to that disk.  I shall list the files that I have later on.

From the first menu, press right and 'select[Start up] and press [Enter]

You will see some setup options already, let's trash those, so press the [space bar] and you will see they are placed back down below.  

As we want to boot from the floppy disk, let's select the 'FDD-1' by moving the arrow-keys to the image and pressing the [space bar].  It doesn't really matter what else you select after that.  Once done, press [Enter] and your changes will be saved and you will be returned to the previous screen.  Again, using the arrow keys move to the 'Restart' and press [Enter] (or you can move the mouse and watch the lovely bird flaps it's wings!)

Because nobody trusts you, you'll be asked again, "OK ?", again, you can press [Enter] or move the flappy bird around the screen to select [OK].  Either way, the device will reboot immediately - so make sure you have plugged the external FDD into the docking unit.

We shall also grab our 256Mb Viking Interworks CF Card (we don't care if it had stuff on it before from a camera as we're going to trash it anyway) and place it into a PCMCIA cradle and place it into the top-slot of the two PCMCIA bays (I'm not really too sure if this was necessary, but as I've always done this and everything works, I thought I'd state it as fact).

Now, we turn on the device and it should boot from the floppy disk.  As I've not got any config.sys or autoexec.bat, the command.com will prompt you for the Date and Time (if you've done it previously, it'll remember what you picked, so could be a quick task, not that it takes long to enter todays date and time)

So, all we need from that is FDISK.exe & FORMAT.com - great!

Here we could do a >dir c: just to see / check that the CF card is recognised as being drive C, but we don't need to as we will detect that via FDISK.

A:\>fdisk

Press [5] and press [Enter]

You should now see that the PCMCIA CF Card is the C: drive, this is indicated by the 244Mb assigned to it and the fact that it is drive 1. Drive 2 is D: and that is 4Mb, that is the internal DOS boot space built into the IBM PC 110 device.  We need to be able to select the CF Card as C: and be number 1 in the list later on.  If you do not do this, then I cannot guarantee that you will be able to boot from that CF Card.

Enter [1] and press [Enter]

You'll be returned to a menu screen, select [3] to Delete the partition.

Then select [1] to delete primary partition. You'll see the details about the device (again, another chance to be 100% sure you are picking the correct drive), select [1] and press [Enter].  Then you have to enter the Volume label as it is shown on the screen, so for me [TOSHIBA256M] and press [Enter]

Are you sure? [Y] and [Enter]

Well, that was painless!.... press [Esc], now press [1] and [Enter] to create DOS partition, press [1] and [Enter] again, select [Y].

and press [Esc], now you can press [2] to Set active partition, but i does it by default.  you can select [4], just to check that all is okay.  If you do, you'll see under 'Status' the letter "A", this indicates that this device can boot (but not always!!!)

Press [Esc] and you'll drop out of fdisk, press 'any key' and you're back to DOS from the A: drive.

Well, the screen will flash and the device will reboot - just to surprise you!  Press [Enter] and [Enter] for the Date and Time and then you'll be back to a DOS prompt.

Now, we have a valid C: drive on the CF Card, but we now need to format it for use....before we do that, let us run an fdisk command that will ensure that the CF Card will boot (I've used this on about 15 CF card that refused to boot, even though I had installed MS-DOS on them properly and I could see the boot flag was set etc... this was the ONLY way I could get them to boot!  this only failed on 1 CF Card - not sure if that card was just faulty in general, but anyway as you can tell, I have more than enough to use!)

A:\>FDISK /MBR

Now, that command resets the Master Boot Record - don't type it yet though!  We need to format the CF Card and place the MS-DOS system files onto it and "then" we do the above, so:

A:\>FORMAT C: /S

Select [Y] and press [Enter], the number will zoom up really quick and you'll be asked for a LABEL.  Enter whatever you want [IBM1002] and press [Enter]

Now, we do the following:

A:\>DIR C:

You should just see COMMAND.COM (although there are a few other files there, but I forgot to copy over ATTRIB to the floppy disk!)

Then type:

A:\>FDISK /MBR

you will not get any output from this command, but it will have executed.

Now, time to switch off the device and unplug the external FDD.  Let's test the new card!  Leave it in the PCMCIA slot and restart the device.

What you are praying to see is the "Starting MS-DOS" and then being asked for the Date & Time.

If you get an I9990302 or I9990305 error message then that means the CF Card could not be read / could not boot (as not recognised as a bootable device).  basically, you're knackered at that point (and that is how I spent about 5 days going around in circles trying to find a solution, but, now we have it - good old 'fdisk /mbr'!)

Then type:

C:\>dir

and you should see the COMMAND.COM all on its lonesome.  AWESOME!  right, that's 97% of the job done!

Time to switch off the device.  Remove the PCMCIA cradle, remove the CF Card and place it into the CF Card slot on the right-hand side of the device.  

Now that we've done that, let's go and reconfigure that 'Start up' BIOS setting so it knows what to boot up first.

Now, if you forget to press [F1] on startup, you "may" get booted into the MS-DOS of the CF Card (that is due to the order I setup the 'Start up' in earlier).  However, we'll go back and change it as there is one other thing that we need to do. that relates to the WiFi card...

So, use the arrow keys to move right (or the mouse0 and select 'Start up', press [Enter], press [space bar], now select the items so that we have HDD-2, FDD-1, HDD-1, PCMCIA selected and press [Enter].

Right, now move LEFT and select "Config", press [Enter], move along and select "Serial".

Now, by default, the (o)Modem 1 will be selected - this is showing the COM1 will be used by the device.  Try as you might, you will not be able to change this as I have it in the image above!  Not that I could find a way, anyway!  We shall come back to how to do that from the DOS prompt later on.

Right, press [Enter][Esc][Enter] and reboot.... except, catch this as we want to shutdown.

Now, get your small flat-head screw driver out and use it to "assist" with the removal of the CF Card.

Now, put the CF Card into whatever CF Card reader device you have connected to a Windows / Linux or Mac laptop.... and you'll see it appear as a drive.

As you can see there are the files that were created / copied when we performed the FORMAT C: /S command.

 

 

Here's a backup of the CF Card (a whole 9MB!), just incase I ever need to get back to a baseline again.

Ah, darn it - blogspot thingy won't let me attach files only URLs....

- Here's a LINK to the zip file

- Here's a LINK to the whole CF Card folder contents

 

As I'm a cheat & I've already done all the hard work previously, I have a copy of the original CF Card named "WIFI01", this contains all of the files and configuration required for the IBM PC 100 to use the Cisco 350 Aironet PCMCIA card and has MTCP, DosLynx and Arachne installed and configured accordingly.

So, it's a quick case of copying them over - remember to "ignore" the files already on the CF Card.

Once finished, Eject the CF Card from your OS (don't want to corrupt it now, do we), remove from the USB Adapter, place it back into the side of the IBM PC 110 device and boot the device back up.... 

"What about the WiFi card?"....hold your horses! We need to run a couple of commands to change that BIOS setting that was referred to earlier, to do that, we boot as normal and now you'll see a message about HIMEM.SYS and then a few other command output, press CTRL+C at this spot, attempt to stop when the MOUSE is yet to be initialised.  Select [Y] to terminate batch job.

Type:

C:\>ps2 imodem disable

C:\>ps2 pmodem 1

The "ps2.exe" is an IBM PC 110 application that allows control of the device and can change BIOS settings.  What you've done above is tell it to disable the modem and now set the PCMCIA to use COM1.

Power off the device.

Now, let's place the aforementioned Cisco Aironet 350 card into the top-slot of the PCMCIA... and turn on the device.

If it complains about not being able to PING, then just type DHCP and if you've got the right info configured already it'll go fetch you an IP address and set the values into the wattcp.cfg file (you may need to copy these values around, depending upon your setup).  You can choose to reoobt and you'll see the final part of the AUTOEXEC.BAT perform the ping test or you can do it manually:

I also have a lockdown on the router, so remember to add the MAC address to the "allowed devices", else it won't get very far!

and there you go.... your IBM PC 100 device is now WiFi enabled and "on the internet"*

!!!!SUCCESS!!!!

You can now repeat this exercise for the 4 other IBM PC 110 devices that I have, once the extra Cisco WiFi cards arrive..... it'll be even more awesome when they can all have their own TFT screens running - network DOOM anyone?!

* - okay, so it is connecting to an old Netgear wifi router using WEP access, which is a bit dodgy and means that these devices can only use WiFi inside the house, but I'm going to investigate what other options I have using more modern WiFi protocols and cards from MS-DOS.