China DOS Union

An IBM laptop. P100 CPU, no optical or floppy drive. After removing the hard disk and attaching it elsewhere, it cannot be read by anything from MS-DOS 3.30 to WinXP. That hard disk has Japanese Win98 installed and uses a FAT12 file system. Could any friend help? I would be extremely grateful.

Haven't tried the MS-DOS 7.10 Super Boot Disk. Not sure whether it would work?

What's so difficult about that? Aren't all floppy disks FAT12 format???

The following is quoted from llfz at 2003-10-17 19:37:54:
An IBM laptop. P100 CPU, no optical or floppy drive. After removing the hard disk and attaching it elsewhere, it cannot be read by anything from MS-DOS 3.30 to WinXP. That hard disk has Japanese Win98 installed and uses a FAT12 file system. Could any friend help? I would be extremely grateful.

Whew..........FAT12 only supports up to 32MB max......how could there possibly be a Japanese version of Win98 on it.....

Japanese laptops use a special partition format!
So it's perfectly normal that it can't be read! ^_^
Better try some other systems instead!
For example Linux

I also know that floppies are FAT12. In the book I studied, Practical DOS Techniques (1993 edition, Tang Xianyu of Sichuan University), FAT12 is introduced in great detail. The problem is that there is no partition format information for this hard disk. It really does have Japanese Windows 98 installed, and the accompanying documentation only says FAT12. I downloaded an NEC PC98 boot disk from the Internet, but it would not boot and load. Also, this partition cannot be recognized by PartitionMagic (pq), from versions 3.0 to 8.0. Because Win98 is installed, I tried various versions of Microsoft's operating systems, including MS-DOS 3.30-7.0 as well as Win32-WinServer2003, both Chinese and English editions, and none of them could recognize it.
Looks like I'll just have to try my luck with other systems such as Linux.

This hard disk and laptop are already worthless; the key thing is to get the data out.

Right, good reminder Whew..........FAT12 only supports up to 32MB max......how could there possibly be a Japanese version of Win98 on it....., but the paper documentation does have the words FAT12 on it. The hard disk is 850m, so FAT12 definitely wouldn't support it. Strange. It's some other format under a Microsoft system, and I have no way to find information on it.

Here is some information I found online: “Why can Japanese 98 be installed directly? Because Window95/98 is a 32-bit operating system, English DOS is 16-bit, while the NEC PC9821 uses 12-bit DOS. Japanese 98 is fully compatible with it, so the boot disk it creates can boot the system, while our 98 can only make a 16-bit DOS boot disk, so it cannot boot the system, let alone install it.”
I guess this laptop is exactly that kind, a Japanese 98 system compatible with 12-bit DOS, but I don't have a Japanese DOS boot disk. Can anyone help?

The following is quoted from llfz at 2003-10-17 22:59:12:
Here is some information I found online: “Why can Japanese 98 be installed directly? Because Window95/98 is a 32-bit operating system, English DOS is 16-bit, while the NEC PC9821 uses 12-bit DOS. Japanese 98 is fully compatible with it, so the boot disk it creates can boot the system, while our 98 can only make a 16-bit DOS boot disk, so it cannot boot the system, let alone install it.”
I guess this laptop is exactly that kind, a Japanese 98 system compatible with 12-bit DOS, but I don't have a Japanese DOS boot disk. Can anyone help?

Is your computer from the PC-98x1 series?

Is your computer from the PC-98x1 series?

There is no PC98-series marking on this computer, and it isn't NEC, it's IBM. The problem is that this system must have been modified; I guess a PC-98x1 could read it, but I don't have that kind of boot disk on hand. I downloaded na-boot.img, which was said to be a PC98-series image, but unfortunately after writing that boot file to a floppy, it still could not boot the computer. Do you have this kind of boot disk?