First post, by tegrady
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Hi, I am working on getting an old 286 10mhz computer up and running.
I got it running, but the bios does not allow the user to configure the hard drive. You have to choose from 43 different types of hard drives.
I was able to get it to format up to 63 mb of the hard driving using type 4. It seems to work well like this, but obviously that's not a lot of hard drive space.
Therefore, I bought a Promise EIDE Pro 16-bit ISA controller with an onboard bios. It is supposed to work with hard drives up to 8gb.
I disabled the hard drives in the motherboard's bios and then restarted the computer.
The computer started up with no errors and the Promise controller was detected. The controller model and bios version appeared on the screen. Then it said "checking IRQ for Secondary IDE...", then it said "setting up HDD on 1st IDE port..." At this point the computer just hangs. It does nothing and I have to restart. It always hangs at the same point.
The only other cards in the system are the sound card and the video card. I removed the sound card in case that was causing a conflict, but I got the same error. I also tried disabling the secondary IDE controller on the card just in case there was some conflict, but nothing changed.
I was reading the manual for the Promise controller and it seemed to both say to disable the onboard hard drive and floppy controllers, and also set the hard drives to "type 1" in the bios. I tried it with the hard drive set to "Type 1" and to "none", but it still gets stuck at the same point.
I have also tried using a real hard drive and a compact flash card adapter, but no change.
My only guess is that there must be a conflict between an IRQ setting on the motherboard and the IRQ of the Promise controller. However, I believe I have disabled all the onboard controllers.
I'm new to working on old computers like this (I'm much better with Windows 95/98 era computers) and I can't think what else might be wrong, other than the Promise controller is simply not compatible with the motherboard.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I have attached a pic of the screen where the computer hangs. Thanks in advance.
UPDATE: I removed the hard drive entirely and tried booting. Now I get past the "setting up HDD on 1st IDE Port". It now adds "..... not found!" after it, and tells me that the Promise EIDE Pro BIOS not installed. I then tried another hard drive that was completely unformatted and it also got this screen. See the updated photos. What does it mean "EIDE Pro BIOS not installed"? Any ideas? Thanks.