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Thinkpad T23 (and now also 600E) boots CP/M-86 (despite of Wikipedia) 
Saturday, August 18, 2012, 07:00 PM
Posted by Administrator
This is great. And it was not done with an ancient IBM PC/XT.
It was done with a Thinkpad T23 (not the most modern one, but still working with Windows XP, and having a build-in high density floppy disk drive ...).
Here is the proof:

There is a Wikipedia Entry for a boot sector explanation, and there is a discussion page for this article, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Boot_ ... _signature
Somebody said there, CP/M-86 with missing magic bytes (0x55 0xAA) in its boot sector could not be used with other PCs except an ancient IBM PC/XT (or in best case, with an original IBM PC/AT). That's simply wrong (test it with the 1.44MB image file and the appropriate floppy disk writing program like RAWRITE, my DOS program writeimg or even David Dunfield's famous ImageDisk).
Boot sectors from floppy disks must not have such a magic byte sequence at the end of the sector (instead, this check is only mandatory for harddisk boot sectors/an MBR on a HD).

Btw.: My Compaq Portable II (an AT compatible machine) boots CP/M-86 also.


Later added:
Meanwhile I've access to a Thinkpad 600E. Of course I was able to boot CP/M-86, too.
Just look at this second picture:

That's the proof "Crispmuncher" just has no idea what he talks about. He told me he "tests" a Thinkpad 600E and he was not able to boot CP/M-86. I guess he has no idea how to transfer the mentioned 1.44MB floppy disk image onto the real floppy disk media.

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