I'd go for a smaller hard drive.. preferably less than 1GB.

I was using it with 4x1MB sticks ratfink and it was working great... no point in more than 4MB in a 286 IMHO...
As for the HDD I used Ontrack disk manager, let bios recognize the HDD with it's wrong size but when the overlay loads I could use a 20GB HDD without any problems... I don't think you can use more than 540MB or something with a 286 bios

Iam going to use 2MB in my 286 computer. Harddisk would be about 200- 500MB what normally was standard on 486 computers. 286s in the days had about 30- 60MB harddisk at least. But in the days you didnt install a whole archive games on it. ( games where also expensive back then) Now i would at least recommend 200-500MB drive. You can get smaller drive if you want.. But if you want a whole archive of games on the harddisk it would be full in knowtime.. Only XT machines are really blocked on bigger harddisk, how bigger it goes, how longer de indexing of the drive takes, because XT processors are just to slow to drive a whole big disk.
For an XT i should take 20 - 80MB at least and no bigger.. 286 can take easily bigger harddrives till 1GB, but it make no sense to use that big harddrive.. 200-500MB should be enough.

Iam using about 1 GB - 2GB in my 386 system.
For 486 ill take 4GB.. and make 2 partitions on the disk.

For the 286 system i should use a regular AT controller board that should drive drives till about the 524MB limit.

I have a 80286 OEM that has 4*1MB that are recognized as 4*256KB. It gives that desktop 2MB RAM.

ratfink wrote:

I recently got a 286 motherboard [thanks to keropi 😉], I was hoping someone could give me some guidance.

Memory: the board will accept 256kb and 512kb sticks of ram but doesn't seem to recognise 4mb sticks. Is that a 286 limit or the chipset [doesn't matter for the 286, I mainly want to check my ram hasn't gone bad].

Hard drives: I've put a Winbond serial/parallel/FDD/HDD card in it, the floppy drives appear to be picked up [the usual noises and LEDs coming on at the right times during boot] but when I attach a hard drive I get an error. The IDE cable is correctly oriented [machine won't boot with it the wrong way round...] and I have the correct geometry set in the bios. Testing with 10gb and 4gb hard drives, known working. In each case the 286 seems to lose the 5.25 inch floppy drive and report a hard drive controller failure [10gb] or C: failure [4gb]. The 4gb drive I am sure worked with this Winbond card in a 386 previously along with 2 FDDs, so it shouldn't be incorrect jumpers on the Winbond card.

Keep in mind, back in the day most 286 systems came with, at most, 1024k of RAM. I think it can address up to 16MB (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) but rarely would you see that much on a 286 class system, and if you did you'd probably have to use an expansion board of some sort. If you want a maxed-out or "hotrod" system then 2 to 4MB is probably plenty. You would have your 640k for DOS, your space between 640 and 1024 for drivers, and then you have the rest for a RAM disk (or the rare game that will run on a 286 that requires XMS (or is it EMS? Always get those confused)).

snorg wrote:

ratfink wrote:

I recently got a 286 motherboard [thanks to keropi 😉], I was hoping someone could give me some guidance.

Memory: the board will accept 256kb and 512kb sticks of ram but doesn't seem to recognise 4mb sticks. Is that a 286 limit or the chipset [doesn't matter for the 286, I mainly want to check my ram hasn't gone bad].

Hard drives: I've put a Winbond serial/parallel/FDD/HDD card in it, the floppy drives appear to be picked up [the usual noises and LEDs coming on at the right times during boot] but when I attach a hard drive I get an error. The IDE cable is correctly oriented [machine won't boot with it the wrong way round...] and I have the correct geometry set in the bios. Testing with 10gb and 4gb hard drives, known working. In each case the 286 seems to lose the 5.25 inch floppy drive and report a hard drive controller failure [10gb] or C: failure [4gb]. The 4gb drive I am sure worked with this Winbond card in a 386 previously along with 2 FDDs, so it shouldn't be incorrect jumpers on the Winbond card.

Keep in mind, back in the day most 286 systems came with, at most, 1024k of RAM. I think it can address up to 16MB (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) but rarely would you see that much on a 286 class system, and if you did you'd probably have to use an expansion board of some sort. If you want a maxed-out or "hotrod" system then 2 to 4MB is probably plenty. You would have your 640k for DOS, your space between 640 and 1024 for drivers, and then you have the rest for a RAM disk (or the rare game that will run on a 286 that requires XMS (or is it EMS? Always get those confused)).

The 286 can address 16mb, but I doubt the memory controller can handle that much. Were 4mb 30 pin sticks even available while the 286 was still being sold? I thought they came out much later. If they didn't come out until after the 286 was already off the market, it makes sense that the memory controller wouldn't recognize them.

I know that 4MB simms 30p where very expensive at that time.. Mostly the 286er used 256K sipp / DIP (only later 286 board had simms) More common was DIP package for standard 286 boards. More expensiver used SIPPs.

sliderider wrote:

snorg wrote:

ratfink wrote:

I recently got a 286 motherboard [thanks to keropi 😉], I was hoping someone could give me some guidance.

Memory: the board will accept 256kb and 512kb sticks of ram but doesn't seem to recognise 4mb sticks. Is that a 286 limit or the chipset [doesn't matter for the 286, I mainly want to check my ram hasn't gone bad].

Hard drives: I've put a Winbond serial/parallel/FDD/HDD card in it, the floppy drives appear to be picked up [the usual noises and LEDs coming on at the right times during boot] but when I attach a hard drive I get an error. The IDE cable is correctly oriented [machine won't boot with it the wrong way round...] and I have the correct geometry set in the bios. Testing with 10gb and 4gb hard drives, known working. In each case the 286 seems to lose the 5.25 inch floppy drive and report a hard drive controller failure [10gb] or C: failure [4gb]. The 4gb drive I am sure worked with this Winbond card in a 386 previously along with 2 FDDs, so it shouldn't be incorrect jumpers on the Winbond card.

Keep in mind, back in the day most 286 systems came with, at most, 1024k of RAM. I think it can address up to 16MB (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) but rarely would you see that much on a 286 class system, and if you did you'd probably have to use an expansion board of some sort. If you want a maxed-out or "hotrod" system then 2 to 4MB is probably plenty. You would have your 640k for DOS, your space between 640 and 1024 for drivers, and then you have the rest for a RAM disk (or the rare game that will run on a 286 that requires XMS (or is it EMS? Always get those confused)).

The 286 can address 16mb, but I doubt the memory controller can handle that much. Were 4mb 30 pin sticks even available while the 286 was still being sold? I thought they came out much later. If they didn't come out until after the 286 was already off the market, it makes sense that the memory controller wouldn't recognize them.

I don't remember when the 4MB sticks first started coming out, but I remember I couldn't afford 12MB of RAM until 1994 or 1995. I felt like the biggest pimp ever with my Cyrix 486-40 and my 12MB. 🤣. Anyway, the 286 would surely have been on the outs by '89 or '90 as it would have been a good 5 or 6 years old at that point. So you're probably right, highly unlikely that the memory controller would have been made to handle that much, even if it was possible.

I think there were a few very late generation 286 chipsets that could take 4MB SIMMs. However, the PCCchips 20MHz M209 board I used to own was not one of them. Maybe C&T NEAT can do it?

Agreed that most 286s use DIP or SIPP though. Back then when people upgraded their memory they would use an ISA expansion card. This is how I put 16MB in a 5170.

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, as I said the memory doesn't matter - 1mb will be enough for me anyway I am sure - I was just curious about the 4mb sticks.

Now found an old quantum fireball 540mb drive from an apple, which gets recognised correctly.

I now get a Boot Manager Menu which thinks the disk has os2 installed but cannot boot it. Presumably Boot Manager is on the hard drive and not part of the 286 bios. Obviously a 286 can't boot macos.

Next question will be operating systems, but I shall check what I have first. Certainly DOS5 and 6.22, but possibly 3.3.

The Citygate chipset can handle 16 MB RAM (4x4 cross country modules 😀 AFAIK the last revision(s) of the Headland had no problems with that either. I do not know about the rest.
You can always step up to a cheap SCSI controller with, 'say, a 1-2 GB drive. Speedy and not a 286 CPU killer.

Ok so it's now running MS-DOS Version 5.00 installed on the hard drive. 😎

Next will be setting up a sound card, a network card, a serial/parallel port card, and some weird card that just seems to have a socketed chip on it [I think the idea was to use this for an updated HD controller BIOS - will get to that later...]. And getting the second fdd recognised.

Slightly interesting, I have this set up on a CoolerMaster Lab testbench I bought new last year. It had mounting holes in the right places for this old board [wouldn't surprise me except people keep saying modern cases cannot take old mainboards].

nice! glad you got it going my friend! 1mb/540MB is more than enough for a 286 IMHO

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think there were a few very late generation 286 chipsets that could take 4MB SIMMs. However, the PCCchips 20MHz M209 board I used to own was not one of them. Maybe C&T NEAT can do it?

Agreed that most 286s use DIP or SIPP though. Back then when people upgraded their memory they would use an ISA expansion card. This is how I put 16MB in a 5170.

What would you ever do with 16mb in a 286 class machine except maybe a very big RAMdisk?

i think 4mb is keeping the 286 busy, it is even enough for a 386sx.