Omnibook 430- Other Operating Systems

[Dave Britten]

Alright, got my 430 card today, and spent some time experimenting with it in the 300. It seems to work fine in that model; I popped it in, and booted right to the tiny DOS 6.20 installation on D:. The tricky part was getting DOS installed to the C: card, though. You have to use OBFDISK on the ROM card to properly partition the card to make it bootable. Then I mounted the partitioned card as a raw disk for a VirtualBox VM, and ran the DOS 6.22 installation. That got the OmniBook booting 6.22. Hurray!

Only had partial success getting Win 3.1 up and running, though. When running in 386-enhanced mode, it would hang shortly after startup, requiring a visit to the reset button. (The exact same thing happened when I tried to do a full installation of Windows on the 1.1 ROM and run it in 386 mode). After a lot of trial and error, it appears you have to disable 32-bit disk access in SYSTEM.INI to prevent the system from hanging.

I still can't get OBSTATUS.EXE working, though; it dies with a GPF as soon as it launches, implicating OBCONFIG.DLL for some reason. Start Windows in standard mode, and it comes right up. Going to have to experiment some more to see if I can get everything running stably. I'd really like to get OBSTATUS working so I can see the battery level in Windows.

On a related note, the Logitech TrackMan Portable works great on the OmniBook. Just tweak SYSTEM.INI and WIN.INI as appropriate to choose either the built-in mouse, or the Logitech. Keep the lines for both mice in each file, and just comment out the one you don't want to use.