Installation dead on arrival - legacy hardware does not boot

Hello,

I can boot fresh FreeDOS installations fine in QEMU, but not on actual hardware from back in the day. The machine reports "read error while reading drive". The problem seems to be the MBR installed by FreeDOS. MS-DOS-based MBRs work fine. I can also provide you with binary dumps of both master boot codes for comparison if that helps.

See also this issue on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/bugs/321/

The issue is not a regression: The MBR supplied with FreeDOS 1.2 does not work on my hardware, either.

Thanks!

Martin