Boot Failure Message

[Paul Biasella]

I have a Tandy 1000EX that's been in storage for over 5 years. I bought some Tandy MS-DOS 5.25" floppy disks from a seller on eBay. When I insert his newly made boot disk in the internal 5.25" drive and turn on the computer, instead of booting up it displays the message "Boot Failure". The disk drive light turns on and it sounds like it's operating correctly. Do I need to clean the disk drive? Do I need a different boot disk? If I add an external floppy drive can I boot from that? Is my internal floppy drive defective?
Have any of you had success with the internal IDE cards that go to 640K and have a flash card drive to boot from?

-Paul Biasella

[Ron Lauzon]

PB> sounds like it's operating correctly. Do I need to clean the disk drive?
PB> Do I need a different boot disk? If I add an external floppy drive can I
PB> boot from that? Is my internal
PB> floppy drive defective?

Yes, you need to clean the disk drive Sadly, you needed to do that
**before** you put the good boot disks in. There's a possibility that the
disks have been damaged by grit in the drive.

I don't know what drives are used for your floppy drives, but some of the
early ones had belt driven drives. Over time, those belts turn into goo.
The drive lights up and makes a sound, but won't work.

[Black Epyon]

As far as I know, the EX can boot from any MS-DOS boot disk, so long as it's a 360K disk properly formatted with the appropriate system files. If you have a CF-IDE type card installed, you can install any version of DOS (5.0 is less memory intensive than 6.2, so I'd go with that instead). Likely, either the drive just needs cleaning (IPA on a Q-tip usually works well enough), or if it happens to be one with a belt, that belt might need replacing.

[Par Yer Rars]

On Mon, 04 Jul 2022 15:01:20 -0400, Dennis Lee Bieber
<wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 4 Jul 2022 11:16:32 -0700 (PDT), Paul Biasella <prb...@gmail.com>
>declaimed the following:

>
>>I have a Tandy 1000EX that's been in storage for over 5 years. I bought some Tandy MS-DOS 5.25" floppy disks from a seller on eBay. When I insert his newly made boot disk in the internal 5.25" drive and turn on the computer, instead of booting up it displays the message "Boot Failure". The disk drive light turns on and it sounds like it's operating correctly. Do I need to clean the disk drive? Do I need a different boot disk? If I add an external floppy drive can I boot from that? Is my internal floppy drive defective?
>

> I'd try to verify the contents of the floppies. According to Wikipedia
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000#1000_EX
>
>"""
>The 1000 EX came with MS-DOS 2.11 and Personal Deskmate on 5.25" 360kB
>diskettes. The MS-DOS was a version specialized for and only bootable on
>the Tandy 1000; it included a version of BASICA (Microsoft's Advanced
>GW-BASIC) with support for the enhanced CGA graphics modes (a.k.a. Tandy
>Graphics or TGA) and three-voice sound hardware of the Tandy 1000.
>"""
>
>Note: "The MS-DOS was a version specialized for and only bootable on the
>Tandy 1000" sort of implies that the reverse is also true, and regular
>MS-DOS disks would not boot.
>
> Otherwise, no help -- I've got a TRS-80 Model III/4 (upgraded main
>board, original housing/floppies/power-supply) in storage. Hasn't been
>powered up in over 20 years. Suspect I'd have to patch the OS for newer
>decades (the original OS only had three bits for the year offset), assuming
>the drive heads don't snap off as soon as the disk spins up.
Yes you should have cleaned and lubed the drive first.
Yes the versions of MS DOS for Tandy were OEM configured
(Video and KeyBoard related)
The 1000 can run up to DOS 3.2 Tandy version, you can find various
Tandy DOS versions at win world pc. No am not a member/contributer
there but for free you should try there IF you can get your floppy
working if those other disks do not work....