Question about PCDOS and IBM 486 PCs (experts please come in, webmaster please help) - China DOS Union Forum

Recently I got my hands on an IBM-brand 486 machine. The owner mistakenly installed WIN98 and now it can't boot; on startup it shows error code "1962". I've removed the hard drive and it's with me now.
This PC uses an IBM-specific BIOS, and I suspect it may be incompatible with operating systems other than PCDOS. So I downloaded a PCDOS boot disk from here, but it didn't work when I tried it. I figure maybe the version is too high, or there is some other reason. Could some expert point me in the right direction—am I correct in this guess or not? Which version of DOS would solve the problem?
One more question: I downloaded the four ZIP packages PCDOS1.10~PCDOS3.21 from the download area, and found that the files inside are all types I don't recognize, like *.izm and *.tdo. How are those used? Please explain.

Thanks in advance!

Floor1　redeye	Posted 2003-04-25 00:00
初级用户　Posts 2　Credits 107
Recently I got my hands on an IBM-brand 486 machine. The owner mistakenly installed WIN98 and now it can't boot; on startup it shows error code "1962". I've removed the hard drive and it's with me now. This PC uses an IBM-specific BIOS, and I suspect it may be incompatible with operating systems other than PCDOS. So I downloaded a PCDOS boot disk from here, but it didn't work when I tried it. I figure maybe the version is too high, or there is some other reason. Could some expert point me in the right direction—am I correct in this guess or not? Which version of DOS would solve the problem? One more question: I downloaded the four ZIP packages PCDOS1.10~PCDOS3.21 from the download area, and found that the files inside are all types I don't recognize, like .izm and .tdo. How are those used? Please explain. Thanks in advance!

Floor2　Wengier	Posted 2003-04-25 00:00
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Then can boot disks for DOSes like MS-DOS, ROM-DOS, FreeDOS, etc. boot it?

Floor3　redeye	Posted 2003-04-25 00:00
初级用户　Posts 2　Credits 107
MSDOS also can't boot. I haven't tried the others. I'm an outsider to DOS, I'll study more in the future.

Floor4　Wengier	Posted 2003-04-25 00:00
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Try this ROM-DOS 7.10 boot disk and see whether it can boot: http://newdos.yginfo.net/dosware/rdos71bd.zip

Floor5　沈洁	Posted 2003-04-26 00:00
金牌会员　Posts 1,812　Credits 4,590　From 上海市
On some IBM computers, the motherboard BIOS is on the hard drive. Could it be that you low-level formatted the hard drive?

Floor6　Dark-Destroy	Posted 2003-04-26 00:00
元老会员　Posts 3,551　Credits 8,312
Do you want to try a lower version of ms-dos?? I remember 486 PCs used lower versions of ms-dos