Moved or Missing IBMBIO.LDR, and
Other Hard Drive Issues
First, some background:
REAL/32 before 7.9 can access disks up to 2 Gigabytes per partition and can have up to a total of four disks or partitions up to this size.
REAL/32 7.9 introduced FAT-32 media which supports larger
partitions and drives.
Most new motherboards have large disk support on board - that is larger than 512 Mb, (parameters 1024
cyls, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track).
To use this facility LBA mode should be set in the CMOS when Fdisk is run. This will retranslate the
BIOS table so that the system is not aware of the remapped drive parameters. On those systems that do not make LBA mode
available in the bios (CMOS) and a large disk is fitted, partitions of up to 512 Mb can be used, that is 1024 sectors, 16 heads, 63
sectors/track for REAL/32 before 7.9 and up to 16 Tera Megabytes for 7.9 and
better.
Manufacturers of hard disks are aware that not all users have motherboards with LBA mode in the Bios so they may provide utility software (often already
installed on the hard disk). This can be in the form of a small boot partition already on the drive; this boot sector causes a small program to remap the bios
drive configuration table in the way the LBA mode does on newer machines.
Because there is no standard for these methods, REAL/32 can not be installed with these system. Usually the hard disk will not be recognised at all, but
in some cases the error message "Moved or missing IBMBIO.LDR" will be displayed. FDISK is an excellent remedy for this with LBA in place.
The dreaded "Moved or missing" message in other circumstances:
When Loader.com is first run, a new boot sector is installed which replaces the one placed there by the original FDISK program. The original boot
sector is stored as LOADER.SAV in the root directory, and a loader file IBMBIO.LDR is placed in the root, its address is poked into the
new boot sector. So any operation which might move or delete IBMBIO.LDR could provoke "Moved or Missing
IBMBIO.LDR" message. This file has System
and Hidden attributes set, so it can easily be missed. Disk defragmenter programs in particular should be told not to move the file.
If you have the message "moved or missing IBMBIO.LDR" appear, there are several possible
solutions. You might simply allow the boot to carry on into a single user Dos and then uninstall
LOADER by typing LOADER /U - but remember you will need to take account of the path to
LOADER.COM, usually in the REAL32\BIN directory on a current system. Once loader is uninstalled
successfully, simply reload it and all should be well.
If the problem persists, it is likely that LOADER.SAV which will have been put
back as the boot sector will have had the wrong location in it as well, due to other attempts to resolve the
problem. However, simply selecting LOADER.SAV before running LOADER /U will force LOADER to rewrite a completely
unblemished boot sector. You might also use a MSDos 6.22/Windows 95 & 98 boot diskette.
Insert the boot diskette into a: and type "FDISK /MBR" which will write a completely new master boot
record. In the unlikely event that problems persist try booting from the MSDos master disks
and then your SYS C: - you can then continue by running LOADER as above.
A typical format for running LOADER would be to use "EDITOR" to create a file usually called
LOADER.TXT, which contains a line of text for each
extra operating system added to the system over and above the original (native) operating system installed
A typical couple of lines might read:
REAL32.SYS M Real/32 7.53, current operating system.
IMSMDOS.SYS M IMS Mdos 7.1 - previous version.
To make loader use this file, include the file name (e.g. loader.txt) as a parameter on the
command line: LOADER LOADER.TXT
Remember to use LOADER /U first if LOADER is already in place!
Note: If you have already installed a system on a disk larger than 512 Mb disk without using
LBA, you must FDISK, reformat and re-install the system
under LBA before proceeding.