# Solved: NEC ProSpeed 286



## jnashe1 (Oct 19, 2000)

Found a nec prospeed 286.

Phoenix Advanced Video Bios v. 1.05.03 
1984-1986 Phoenix Tech. LTD

Phoenix 80286 Rom Bios Plus v. 3.10.06
1984-1986 Phoenix Tech. LTD

640K Base Memory 00000K extended

Boot up says missing operating system. 

Anyone have the OS for this system on 31/2 disks. 
I imagine it would have to be formatted to 720?

Would appreciate any help.

Thanks


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## jimi (Jun 14, 2000)

just format the drive and throw whatever OS you can get on a 286, DOS, win95 - if memory serves me right you can get 95 on there - not sure if 98 will load on it though. there isn't an OS for the particular machine.


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## m-dash (Nov 12, 2003)

Trust me, trying to put Win 95 on a 286 computer is doomed to failure... even trying to load Windows 3.1 on a PC with 640K conventional and 0K extended memory is going to be frustrating.

jnashe1, does the Prospeed *have* a hard drive? Back in the 80's my first PC was an NEC Multispeed, an XT-compatible laptop that uses two floppy drives, both 720K (no hard drive). It came with an NEC-customized version of DOS 3.2 with it, and you had to boot from the DOS disk, then replace it with a floppy version of WordPerfect or Lotus or whatever you were using.

I'm thinking that your machine since it's a 286 may have 1.44 MB drives instead of 720K drives... I remember that at least up to DOS 5, the master disks still came on 720K disks, although there were 3 of them. (DOS 3.2 and 3.3 came with just one disk.)

You should be able to find an older version of DOS on Ebay for practically nothing. If your machine uses 1.44 MB drives it will still read a 720K disk just fine.

M-dash


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## jnashe1 (Oct 19, 2000)

Has HD. Have dos 3.3 and 5.0 on 5 1/4. Most of dos 6.x on 3 1/2. Win 3.1 on 3 1/2.
Used disk 1 of all the 3 1/2's to boot... no go. Most eBay offerings for early dos on 5 1/4.
Will try to find 3.3. This is not a MUST do project, just wanted to see if I could get this
thing up and running. Thanks for all your help.


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## m-dash (Nov 12, 2003)

Don't bother trying to boot from the Windows 3.1 disk -- the disk isn't bootable; it only installs after DOS is already on the hard drive, and runs on top of DOS. It seems to me that the DOS 3.3 master floppy contained uncompressed files, so you could boot directly from the floppy.

I never used DOS 4, but by the time DOS 5 came out I don't think you could directly boot from the master disk, unless it was a "full" version designed for a PC with no operating system (not upgrade version) -- I think you had to run the install program from Disk 1 and use the install routine to uncompress the files and create bootable disks on floppy if you weren't actually installing to a hard drive.

Any version of DOS from 3.3 up that you can find a complete set of 3.5" disks for should probably work for the NEC, even DOS 6. Good luck!

M-dash


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