You shouldn’t be getting an Abort, Retry, Fail on startup, per PC/MS-DOS standards unless one of your startup files (CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT) tries to access logical drive E: and it doesn’t exist or can’t be read from. I don’t have any experience with OrangePC, but this would be unusual on an actual machine. What happens when you hit Abort?
EDIT: To clarify, an A,R,F error indicates some process tried to access something on logical drive E. MSCDEX doesn’t do this, because there’s no guarantee you’ll have a disc physically in the drive on startup. If it did, you’d get this every time you tried to start up without a CD-ROM inserted.
Additionally, you said you tried a CD in the drive. But did you try a FAT/FAT32/ISO9660 formatted CD-ROM or a Macintosh formatted CD?