What happens if you use an ISA IDE controller?

Hadn't gone that route yet as I was hoping to use the faster VLB port. I can give it a shot

Should it recognize the CF card? I know the adapter has power as it lights up.

Also had the wrong voltage selected for my proc so I need to adjust that to but I don't know if that could cause any of the issues

I had a similar issue a while back. CF card wasn't detected on a particular VLB controller, although HDD was. Exchanging it with another controller card (either VLB or ISA) fixed it. Not sure why that is, because the ISA controller I tried was from 1990 so, if anything, I expected that one to be less compatible than a newer VLB controller, but I guess that's not how it works.

Maybe it's the CF to IDE adapter. I tried a few different CF cards and the results weren't different. I used one of these adapters:

The one I have looks identical to that one

The other one is similar but the ide port is at a 90 degree angle

Was that VLB controller a combind floppy/IDE controller ?

Did you connect power to the adapter? Do any of the LEDs light up?

Have you tried the adapter on other machines just to try it's not broken?

What size CF cards you were using, and do you know how large drives the BIOS supports?

I would try the secondary IDE port, as primary IDE ports and CF cards have compatibility issues with floppy interfaces, but that should not prevent the BIOS from detecting the CF card.

Yes, its a combined Floppy / IDE Controller.....

Did you connect power to the adapter? Do any of the LEDs light up? - Yeah, I gave it power, LED on the Adapter Lights up....

Have you tried the adapter on other machines just to try it's not broken? - Yes, I have used this on other cards. I used to have it attached to the CF ISA Adapter Card.

What size CF cards you were using, and do you know how large drives the BIOS supports? - This I dont know...the card I have is a 4 GB card...was hoping to make it into two 2 GB Partitions. The IDE Controller does see bigger HDD"s though as I had a 20 GB attached and it saw it fine.

Sometimes it happens I guess. For a 386DX40 machine, I was hoping to have a better controller with its own BIOS ROM to overcome the 540MB limit that the motherboard BIOS had. I purchased a NOS SIIG ISA EIDE controller with two channels, probably one of the most modern ISA IDE controllers available.

Although its BIOS was correctly identifying the CF cards (I tried 512MB, 1GB, 2GB cards from different manufacturers) by both brand and size at boot time, It never allowed me to access them when the OS (MS-DOS 6.22) booted up. There was no disk on the system according to all the partitioning utilities I tried.

The funny thing is, when I tried a much older and primitive IDE controller, (aside from the 540MB limit) everything was perfectly working.

tayyare wrote:

Sometimes it happens I guess. For a 386DX40 machine, I was hoping to have a better controller with its own BIOS ROM to overcome the 540MB limit that the motherboard BIOS had.

If you're using pure DOS, you can also use the AT-version of XT-IDE BIOS.
Just "burn" an 27128 EPROM (or other) and put it on an ethernet card.Then use the configuration program for that and enable ethernet boot.
When done, you can set the CMOS settings for HDDs to "none" (but let the controller stay enabled).
It worked for me in DOS so far, but my WfW 3.11 FastDisk drivers didn't like it. OS/2 also didn't boot.
- I still need to perform several tests, though, so I can't say that they are really incompatible.

Jo22 wrote:

If you're using pure DOS, you can also use the AT-version of XT-IDE BIOS. Just "burn" an 27128 EPROM (or other) and put it on a […]
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tayyare wrote:

Sometimes it happens I guess. For a 386DX40 machine, I was hoping to have a better controller with its own BIOS ROM to overcome the 540MB limit that the motherboard BIOS had.

If you're using pure DOS, you can also use the AT-version of XT-IDE BIOS.
Just "burn" an 27128 EPROM (or other) and put it on an ethernet card.Then use the configuration program for that and enable ethernet boot.
When done, you can set the CMOS settings for HDDs to "none" (but let the controller stay enabled).
It worked for me in DOS so far, but my WfW 3.11 FastDisk drivers didn't like it. OS/2 also didn't boot.
- I still need to perform several tests, though, so I can't say that they are really incompatible.

This PC now works with an 3gb SCSI HDD + SCSI CD ROM, and a 2GB IDE disk (via Ontrack Disk Manager) + CF to IDE adapter (for data transfer only, so C512MB is ok), so the problem is solved. My first attempt was to utilize all two EIDE channels for 2 x IDE HDD, IDE CD-ROM + CF adapter. When the EIDE card refused to work, I just changed it with a single channel primitive IDE controller, and add an on hand set of SCSI controller/CDROM/HDD. and it just works and target achieved. 😊

Good to hear! Glad you got it playing nicely with these parts! 😁

My woes continue....

My Controller card now sees the CF Card and Adapter fine....but now even though it sees the floppy drives, any disk I put in the A: (The 5 1/4") to try and start a boot disk gives a non system or disk error and the drive barely reads the disk. Tried 3 different Drives with the same issues....even removed the 3 1/2 and only set the one drive in BIOS, but it knows the drive is there, but the drive just wont work right...before the drives were reading disks, but were failing on reading mid way through the read....I have replaced both drives with others since.

Tried different cables as well.

What if you replace the CF with an actual HDD? Does it solve your issues?

I also had a problem with a CF adapter in a PC and the only solution was to move the adapter + CF to the secondary IDE channel. On the primary there were all sorts of issues. This was with an integrated IDE controller on a SiS 82c496/7 based motherboard.

Here's the whole issue now:

Computer sees the Hard Drive (CF Card-IDE Adapter with nothing on it yet) and doesnt seem to have an issue with it, recognizes it on POST. After that, the system will flip to the next screen and sit there with no movement....

The Floppy Drives are a different story. I dont see the Floppy Drive lights come on when the computer boots at all. If I change the BIOS to boot to Floppy first, the computer boots, recognizes the Hard Drive, and then the 5 1/4" drive will run very quiet, with no movement on the drive itself (arm doesnt move, head doesnt move) and I get an Non-System Disk or Disk Error and the process stops there. I am using a good bootable floppy, but even if the disk was bad, the drive isnt doing anything to check it...

I have tried 3 different 5 1/4" inch drives, 2 Different Floppy Cables, Made Sure the BIOS settings are correct for each drive (A is the 5 1/4" 1.2 MB and B is the 3 1/2" 1.44 MB) and still nothing.

I have even tried two different controllers and the results are exactly the same...

Cant get Controller to see regular HDD"s, as all the ones I have I think are too large....

Could it be the power supply? Something else?

This probably isn't the problem with your floppy drives, but I also had one of my 5,25" drives exhibit that same behavior of no movement at all. I manually moved the head assembly a bit and that seems to have fixed it. It was stuck or something, but in your case I find it hard to believe that 3 drives would suffer from the same problem.

Sorry if I can't be of any more help. Old computers are hard...

Oh, and you did check that the floppy cable is in the correct position right?