What type of DX4 CPU do you have? Write back or write through?
Your motherboard might only support the latter.
Same with HDD capacity. Some older controllers were limited to 2.1 GB.

jesolo wrote:

What type of DX4 CPU do you have? Write back or write through?
Your motherboard might only support the latter.
Same with HDD capacity. Some older controllers were limited to 2.1 GB.

thanks for you reply, how do i find out which one it is?

also: is hdd capacity limit a matter of i/o controller, of mainboard or both?

nemail wrote:

...I have two issues at the moment:
- max. disk size seems to be about 500MB - is that due to the mainboard BIOS or due to the Winbond I/O controller or do both devices have to support drives larger 500MB?
- weird characters during boot and freezes: sometimes random parts of the screen output are replaced by random characters, during POST, as well as when I enter the BIOS utility. When this happens, 99% of the time the machine also locks up before POST completes.....

- If your VLB controller have its own BIOS supporting big drives (an EIDE controller?), then, no, AFAIK your motherboard BIOS does not need to be supporting drives bigger than 528 (504)MB.

- Those kind of artifacts might be related to defective RAM on board the video cards. If they are socketed, I suggests checking to be sure if they are seated well.

tayyare wrote:

- If your VLB controller have its own BIOS supporting big drives (an EIDE controller?), then, no, AFAIK your motherboard BIOS does not need to be supporting drives bigger than 528 (504)MB.

- Those kind of artifacts might be related to defective RAM on board the video cards. If they are socketed, I suggests checking to be sure if they are seated well.

I don't think that it is EIDE or that it has its own BIOS.

I have two GD5426, one with addon RAM and one without. neither of them seems to work. I also found a S3 805 VLB card which I know is working 100% (in my 486DX2-66) and with that card inserted I get no VGA output at all.
The only cards which seem to work are pure ISA cards (GD5426 ISA, OAK OTI077 are working). May the VLB slots be defective? or may there be some conflict with the VLB I/O controller? I've already connected only a 200MB drive so there shouldn't be any incompatibilities anymore.

With 486 gear, I start with a "simple" CPU. A stock standard 5V 486DX and only the floppy drive. If you don't have a manual with all the jumper settings, try to find one. 486 boards are a jumper nightmare.

Then I run memtest a few times, check out the BIOS options and keep an eye out for any issues.

With the hard drive size, I would go straight to using DDO software. Manually configure the drive with 1024/16/63 and use EZ-Drive, which you can download from here: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/western-digital1.html

It will create up to four FAT16 paritions. If you only want one, let it do it's thing. Then later, delete the partitions you don't need.

Hi

i've now put the memory from one VLB card to the other one and now it seems to be working, no more lockups or fragments (the cards are nearly identical). Additionally, I used the second VLB slot for graphics now, not the third slot. So maybe the third slot is damaged somehow (due to mainboard bending, e.g.).

I have managed to fully access both drives with Seagate Diskwizard which I have used successfully before, I just wanted to try it without DDO, thanks for the hint, philscomputerlab.

Now I have another issue, I have connected the CD drive to the secondary IDE port of the Winbond VLB Multi I/O controller and tried to install it during boot of my boot floppy using toshv218 driver in config.sys and shcdx33f in autoexec.bat (I've used them successfully before) but the cd driver doesn't detect any CD drive. is there a chance that the Winbond controller does not support CD drives? If it definitely SHOULD support CD drives, I'll try another drive or another driver.
Otherwise I could try a sound blaster card with onboard IDE for the CD drive.

Thank you all!

I never heard any VLB controllers with two IDE channels and not supporting CD drives. Even my 25 five year old single channel ISA IDE controllers can do that. Are you sure you adjusted master/slave jumpers accordingly?

I also suggest booting up your system with a standard windows 98 startup floppy. You can find one here:

http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/98.html

They are good at detecting and installing CD-ROMs.

tayyare wrote:

I never heard any VLB controllers with two IDE channels and not supporting CD drives. Even my 25 five year old single channel IS […]
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I never heard any VLB controllers with two IDE channels and not supporting CD drives. Even my 25 five year old single channel ISA IDE controllers can do that. Are you sure you adjusted master/slave jumpers accordingly?

I also suggest booting up your system with a standard windows 98 startup floppy. You can find one here:

http://www.allbootdisks.com/download/98.html

They are good at detecting and installing CD-ROMs.

Thanks, will try that. I just noticed that at POST the system says Serial Port(s): None and Parallel Port(s): None, allthough they are enabled and configured jumper-wise on the IO Controller. I already tried different IRQs and hardware addresses, no luck 🙁

Someone once told me that Winbond I/O Controllers are rather incompatible and the most uncomplicated ones are from GEAR. I have a GEAR controller here, but it isn't VLB unfortunately and I wanted to get max performance out of that box... 🙁

Question:

I have two issues at the moment:
- max. disk size seems to be about 500MB - is that due to the mainboard BIOS or due to the Winbond I/O controller or do both devices have to support drives larger 500MB?

Answhere:

Motherboard or controller card needs to have LBA support.. Mostly it could be that some older motherboard biosses did get LBA support in later revisions of the motherboard..
Back in the day it was really rare that manufacturers would offer you bios upgrades, some would do, but most of them didnt.(there wasnt really a platform about it) Bios upgrades came available when socket 5 / socket 7 was released..

It depends on the age of the motherboard (if it was an first generation one, or a later on) if it came with LBA support or not.. So boards from 1992-1993 didnt came not with LBA with certainty, because LBA was more a feature on later period boards from 1994-1996..

If you can find an other bios for it, the best way to tackle your problem is to find an controller with bios eprom on board that will adding LBA support to your motherboard.. Or trying to find an LBA add-on card..

If your motherboard supports LBA, your controllers doesnt need that bios extension, most of the normal controller would work as well.

- weird characters during boot and freezes: sometimes random parts of the screen output are replaced by random characters, during POST, as well as when I enter the BIOS utility. When this happens, 99% of the time the machine also locks up before POST completes.

If all of those graphics cards give you the same negative result, it could be that you motherboard bios could be corrupted..In order to exclude that try other memory sticks, other processor, other floppy / harddisk controller.. And trying on other graphics card with an other chipset on it.. (maybe something with compatibillity?)
If it is still the same, then motherboard bios would be the culprit.

nemail wrote:

weird characters during boot and freezes

VLB graphics cards not inserted properly?

Thanks for all your advices and help!

My conclusion after some hours of testing and playing around is that the mainboard somehow has to be faulty because sometimes (mostly not) serial and parallel ports get detected during POST when using the Winbond VLB I/O controller, in another (very similar) Soyo motherboard I have the Winbond VLB I/O Controller works like a charm and everything seems to work on the faulty motherboard as long as I don't use the VLB slots. As I've bought it for EUR 3,51 on ebay (allthough "tested and ok") it is not a big loss. The bigger loss is now that I have to look out for a new DX4 capable VLB or PCI board.

weird characters were due to a defective VLB VGA card, thats for sure because the same card did the same weird characters in another VLB system.

Random freezes always somehow had to do with the cards in the VLB slots which work in another system like a charm.

I've also tried many different memory modules (also 30 pin SIMM instead of 72 pin to be sure not to have EDO instead of FPM).

I've even tried multiple 486 DX4-100 (i've got 3 or 4 plus 2 Am486 DX4-100). I might have started some of the CPUs with 5V for a few seconds because at the beginning I had the wrong mainboard manual and set the jumpers the wrong way 🙁 But I guess that shouldn't have hurt the CPUs too much as they are still booting flawlessly and everything is working as long as I don't use the VLB slots (seems I was lucky here)...
or is VLB a CPU builtin feature which might have been damaged??

If you are out for looking a new 486 board, and if you have no sentimental connection to your VLB cards, go for a PCI 486 board. Your life will be much easier. I don't own any 486 at the moment (fried one last year) but I was a university student and part time PC tech during the times, (around 1993-1995) and I remember how happy we were when the PCI 486 boards start to show up on the workshop, and VLB fall from popularity. They were such pains...