So I have in my possession 9 PQI 128MB Disk On Module SSD's. We use these to house German DOS 6.22 and a custom program for controlling Automated Chain Hoists (You can probably YouTube VARIOLIFT and get an idea of the sillyness I'm up to.)
I got these drives off Ebay as it's the only place I can find them this small anymore.
It appears as though in their last tasking, they were loaded with a Linux OS and program to run machinery. I'm having a beast of a time undoing this.
I initially plugged them into my laptop via an external IDE hard drive enclosure. They didn't pop up in explorer nor could I find them via DOS commands. I ended up looking in the Disk Management window and located them there. They were partitioned into 122MB and 2 MB sections. I figured the easiest thing to do was delete the volumes, then do the long format back to FAT.
This worked as far as allowing me to finally gain access to them via Explorer, but when I put them into the computers we use for the control system I'm running into headaches.
The computer posts just fine then goes into "Verifying DMI Pool Data" after which it says: Bad Stage2 Loader Error.
I did a bit of Googling and have pretty much come up dry. The one semi-solution I found was to put an OS onto the drive in hopes of making this go away. So I popped in the first German MS-DOS disk and rebooted the computer. It allowed me into the installer and I successfully loaded DOS 6.22. However upon reboot, I get the same error again.
I've tried formatting the drive numerous times now, though it's always done from my laptop, as I can't get to a DOS prompt on the operating computers because of these issues.
A friend that's a programmer sent me a link to Windows' site about formatting the drive after saying it's a GRUB issue that I'm having. However the steps outlined there are all ones I've already tried.
Any idea how I can stop this problem?
---Everyone else's suggestion is "LOLOLOL DOS! Get a new computer dude! How LAME!!!!!!1!!11one!!" Not an option here folks. Custom software written in 1996 controlling a system via a protocol that went out of use in early 2000. Gotta keep this thing alive until I can finish the R&D for the new system.