The IBM ThinkPad 365ED can start Windows 98 DOS from a CompactFlash card in a PCMCIA ATA adapter, but its PCMCIA BIOS is not fully compatible with the Windows 98 IO.SYS boot path.
A normally prepared active FAT16 card reaches IO.SYS and then stops on a black screen with a blinking cursor. Two independent firmware compatibility problems cause the failure:
- the PCMCIA BIOS hangs when
IO.SYSrereads CHS 0/0/1 throughINT 13h; - the BIOS leaves the head-count byte in the geometry structure at zero, causing a 32-bit division by zero inside
IO.SYS.