I take it there's no Auto-Detect feature in the BIOS?

clueless1 wrote:

I take it there's no Auto-Detect feature in the BIOS?

Nope. That'd be too easy.

Older BIOSes usually had predefined settings under 0 to 46, with 47 (as I recall) being available as a "user" setting under which you could manually capture your HDD settings.
EDIT: If your parameters matches the "Phoenix-A368SX", then type 48 should be your user defined type.

jesolo wrote:

Older BIOSes usually had predefined settings under 0 to 46, with 47 (as I recall) being available as a "user" setting under which you could manually capture your HDD settings.

Yup, that's how mine is. Had to look up the Cylinders etc for my CF card. Looks like OP already has that data though?

Type 48 gives me an invalid entry.

I did find the type using trial and error - Type 17 seems to work for me. Finally booted up - MSDOS 6.22 with some old DOS kids games (typing tutorials, etc). No Windows. And some questionable EXE and batch files...

I'm thinking of making a backup and putting in DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 on it. Not sure what are some good games for a DX-33. I'll take a look at my sound card collection to see if anything suitable for it.

Kinda fun to play with an old 486. 😀 It has a blue ZIF socket that says Overdrive Ready. Might have to see if I can drop a DX2-66 in there as well as some 30-pin SIMMS. Currently there are 4 free SIMM slots.

FYI, Type 17 is:
CYL: 977
Heads: 5
Sect: 17
WPComp: 300
LZone: 977

Cheers!

Are you looking into larger drives? 40MB won't hold many 486-era games.

I have no idea if Conner produced different models at the same size, but for whatever it's worth I can corroborate that the Conner 40MB drive that came with my family's 386 was factory configured as Type 17, so assuming yours is the same drive (I don't know what model number ours was) then that's what was intended.
I remember there was also some confusion on how to configure it as a slave. The originally documented settings didn't work on a later system, but I eventually found updated jumper settings for slave mode on Seagate's web site (they had taken over by that point). Hopefully the jumper info on the site you linked are the updated settings.

But yeah, you'll probably want more space. 40MB capacity on a 386 or 486 always sucked. 😀

I didn't know there were 486s without a user hdd type in BIOS. In fact I still don't believe it 🤣

konc wrote:

I didn't know there were 486s without a user hdd type in BIOS. In fact I still don't believe it 🤣

It's old enough to have a 40 MB HDD, so how hard is it to believe it doesn't have a user HDD type? 😀 it also uses 30 pin SIMMs.

It's surprisingly very bare bones. Just a 1.44 floppy and a hard drive. The motherboard only have a single IDE channel.

clueless1 wrote:

Cheers!

Are you looking into larger drives? 40MB won't hold many 486-era games.

If it supports it, sure. For a retro 486 gaming PC thought, I'd like to build it with something newer.

This NCR System 3230 is circa 1990. At minimum I'd like a DX-2 using 72-pin SIMMs...early Multimedia PC 2.

GuyTechie wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Cheers!

Are you looking into larger drives? 40MB won't hold many 486-era games.

If it supports it, sure. For a retro 486 gaming PC thought, I'd like to build it with something newer.

This NCR System 3230 is circa 1990. At minimum I'd like a DX-2 using 72-pin SIMMs...early Multimedia PC 2.

If there is no "user definable type", then there probably will be no native support for many larger disks, but you can always use overlay software like Ontrack Disk Manager (or any other clones of it that came with HDD manufacturer brands).

Just to be sure, when you choose type 48, is it really not let you enter the parameters of this drive?

tayyare wrote:

If there is no "user definable type", then there probably will be no native support for many larger disks, but you can always use overlay software like Ontrack Disk Manager (or any other clones of it that came with HDD manufacturer brands).

Or an SCSI drive (just kidding)! 😀 I think CF cards will also work with fake CHS parameters, as long as the total drive capacity isn't exceeded.
That's how I used my 80MB conner drive in my 286. Some people also used the XT-IDE BIOS on their network cards.
Another idea is to hack or replace the system BIOS (Ontrack is also a hack more or less).
And let's don't forget, there are also LBA enhancer cards with their own HDD BIOSes..

Thanks for all the tips!

For those who are still non-believers, I'll take photos or video of the BIOS when I have some time.

While the battery still looks good and clean, I wonder if I should remove it for the sake of longevity. It's almost 27 years old, after all! Surprisingly it's a lithium ion battery that looks to be rechargeable, not an NiCad. I'll see if I can take a photo of that as well.

I'll make a separate thread about the NEC System 3230 if you guys are interested. This thread was mostly about that darn hard drive setting.

For as long as I worked on PCs, I never had to deal with a BIOS that didn't have a user defined setting. And as I just learned, "drive types" are not standardized, so you can't even go by a universal chart. The drive type is a collection of "popular" hard drive parameters and each type number is different depending on the BIOS manufacturer. So Type 17 on the Phoenix BIOS (which is what I suspect the NEC System 3230 uses) is different from another BIOS.

Also, even though I've worked on machines without auto-detection, they had user-defined options (motherboards without hard drive controllers, etc).

40 MB HDD is the smallest 3.5" desktop hard drive I've ever encountered! Must've been one of the first 3.5" modern-style HDD. (if you didn't know any better, you would think it's a newer EIDE drive).

FYI, the only expansion card on this thing is an ISA Ethernet/Token ring card. There is a RJ-45 jack and a D-sub connector that's about the size of a game port (15 pin or so).