VOGONS


First post, by Tommaso

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I have an 8088 Turbo XT that I found wrapped in plastic, with a monitor, and both look to be brand new. By looking at them they look to never have been used. Is has two 5.25 inch 320k floppies but no hard drive and is an IBM clone. I have an old 40 meg drive that I can put in it with a controller card, but the thing that is confusing me is there doesn't seem to be any documentation on what keys to press to get into the bios. I am beginning to think old PC's don't have a bios like in newer systems. I know I have to enter the data for the drive so the computer can communicate with the hard drive, but finding where to enter the data is the problem. Does it need software to instal the hard drive? I really want to get this computer running and am anxious to try some old games. Thanks in advance!

Tommaso

Reply 1 of 9, by Imperious

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Your very lucky to find a NOS XT computer. XT PC's do not have a bios that can be entered and altered like newer pc's. Everything must be configured by hardware jumpers or software.
In order to use that 40MB HDD you need an MFM controller card.

The best way to get files onto one of these is to build a Lo-tech ide card or cf adaptor. https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/lo-tech-isa … mpactflash-pcb/
You have to build it yourself though. I built one and it is very easy to just remove the cf card, insert it into my moderm pc and load whatever files I wish.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the XT bios does not support IDE by default, but needs bios rom extensions for that and some other devices like 1.44MB floppy drives.
A 1.44mb floppy drive will work, but only for 720k.

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Reply 2 of 9, by Zup

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I ran once Hiren's Boot CD on a 2006 iMac, from the CD.

It got to the boot menu and hanged there, because keyboard was USB and DOS need a DIN5 or ps/2 keyboard (using BIOS or ports 0x60).

Using a PC, most BIOSes have some kind of options to enable legacy support (and allow using DOS with USB keyboards). That option is missing on some UEFIs, and surely is not present on Mac.

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Reply 3 of 9, by Imperious

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Zup wrote:

I ran once Hiren's Boot CD on a 2006 iMac, from the CD.

It got to the boot menu and hanged there, because keyboard was USB and DOS need a DIN5 or ps/2 keyboard (using BIOS or ports 0x60).

Using a PC, most BIOSes have some kind of options to enable legacy support (and allow using DOS with USB keyboards). That option is missing on some UEFIs, and surely is not present on Mac.

This is a computer from the 1980's, there is no modern type graphical bios at all.

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Reply 5 of 9, by Zup

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Imperious wrote:

This is a computer from the 1980's, there is no modern type graphical bios at all.

Sorry, that was meant to be posted on a thread about DOS and iMac.

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Reply 6 of 9, by Jo22

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Imperious wrote:

XT PC's do not have a bios that can be entered and altered like newer pc's. Everything must be configured by hardware jumpers or software.
In order to use that 40MB HDD you need an MFM controller card."

Yep, only very exotic Turbo XT's like Juko XT maybe had a BIOS "CMOS Setup Utility Program" (jeez, what a long name!) 😁

Setting up a MFM drive isn't that diffcult. It just needs a bit of time and patience.. So don't rush it.

Things to consider :
- be careful to use the correct encoding (MFM vs RLL)
- interleave factor (find the sweetspot, spinrite may help)
- tell the controller about bad sectors (check table on HDD label)
- use the right landing zone for the parking program
- don't forget the low-level formatting

Oh, and here's a little tip:
Use FDISK/Format from DOS 3.x to ensure the disk is correctly formatted (fine for MFM disks upto ~30MB).
These older versions work on a head/cylinder basis and don't exceed the disks capacity.
Maybe Compaq DOS 3.31 is the most modern version here, don't know.
(Note: Some OEM versions used different sector sizes not compatible with normal versions of MS-DOS).

In theory, programs from DOS 6.2x should also work just fine, but I had a few issues with them:
They allocated more disk space than was available. 1MB too much, to be exactly.
I had a 20MB disk and Fdisk created a 20MB partition which Format was unable to format.
After I changed partition size to 19MB, Format finished formatting without any complaints.

I can only speculate as to why it is like this, but I guess the older drives either need a bit of
extra space to be left untouched or the newer utilities align their partitions in a different way.

Another difference is that DOS 3.x used FAT16 and DOS 6.x uses FAT16B (whenever it is able to).
Anyway, I don't want to start a discussion about this now.
I only mentioned it in case someone encounters the same trouble as me.

More information about this can be found on Wikipeetia the misspelled encyclopedia. 😉
http://www.wikipeetia.org/File_Alocation_Table

I hope this helps a bit.

Please keep in mind that I'm no XT expert myself. so better double check everything I said. 😉

Imperious wrote:

Another thing to keep in mind is that the XT bios does not support IDE by default, but needs bios rom extensions for that and some other devices like 1.44MB floppy drives.
A 1.44mb floppy drive will work, but only for 720k.

That's true. For 1.44Mb/1.2MB floppiy drives he needs a socalled "high-speed" floppy controller. Sometimes not even 720KB drives work properly on XTs.
They' are sometimes misdetected as 360KB drives and you have to setup a device driver (driver.sys) or use the drivparm variable (not driveparm!)
Note that drivparm wasn't working in PC DOS 3.x without a patch or a trick. More about this can be read here:
http://www.uncreativelabs.net/textfiles/dos/BDRIVE.TXT
http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/oldcomps … s/DOS-undoc.txt
http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/driver.sys.htm

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Reply 7 of 9, by elianda

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There is a simple trick to enter the BIOS if you don't know the key combination which also works on my Turbo-XT.
On reboot just press ESC and hold it, the BIOS detects a stuck key and stops with like 'Press F1 to enter BIOS...'.

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Reply 8 of 9, by Tommaso72

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I have not had time to work on the XT this last week but this week-end am going to try to install the hard drive. The drive I have was taken from a working machine years ago and is larger than I thought, it is a Micropolis and is 383 megs. I didn't think it was so large because of it's physical size being so massive. The model number is 1558 it that helps. Also, the controller card I have that came with the drive is a 16 bit card, so I doubt it will work on the 8 bit XT board. I do have another controller card from a Compaq model 1 portable computer that recently had its hard drive stop working. I was thinking of using this, do you think this will be compatible? I hope my drive is not too new to be used on an XT, but I do believe it is old enough, may be a server drive being so large for the time period?

Thanks for all the response and I will take some pictures of it all this weekend and post them. I have not done this before on this site but how hard can it be? Thanks again!

Tommaso

Reply 9 of 9, by Tommaso72

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Jo22 wrote:
Imperious wrote:

XT PC's do not have a bios that can be entered and altered like newer pc's. Everything must be configured by hardware jumpers or software.
In order to use that 40MB HDD you need an MFM controller card."

Yep, only very exotic Turbo XT's like Juko XT maybe had a BIOS "CMOS Setup Utility Program" (jeez, what a long name!) 😁

I just wanted to add that I tried to look up what mother board I have and it most resembles a Juko board, but not exactly. There is no markings on the board I can see, but the video card is a Juko G-7B so may be the board is Juko too. The bios chip reads "Pheonix Turbo 2". Like I said earlier, I will post pictures to make it easier for you all to help me.

Tommaso