It doesn't answer your question, but I noticed that hard drive looks too large for that board. If I remember right early motherboards (up until '93 or '94) could only support up to 520 MB thanks to Bios restrictions. Yours is 540 MB. You'll need to partition it before it will register. You might be better off with a Caviar 2420 at 420 MB than a 2540.

thanks for that side note!
regardless of that, i tried booting with only one floppy attached -> same result

Is there a jumper on the IO boards to disabled the Floppy controller? I have a couple of winbond multi i/o's that were all set by the previous owner to disable floppy, presumably because the motherboard had a controller built onboard.

i dont think so, but I'll check that.. thanks!

Do I spy an IBM PS/2 Model 30 8086 under that 286?

Brickpad wrote:

Do I spy an IBM PS/2 Model 30 8086 under that 286?

indeed, you do 😉

edit: look at our post counters and join dates 🤣

nemail wrote:

Brickpad wrote:

Do I spy an IBM PS/2 Model 30 8086 under that 286?

indeed, you do 😉

edit: look at our post counters and join dates 🤣

Now we're even. 😁

On a serious note, I have both 8086 and 80286 Models 30s. My 8086 came with a dead 20MB drive (no surprise), and missing floppy bezel. The 286 is complete, but it's the single 1.44MB variant (8530-E01). I have some SCSI cards and an old (Mac) NuDesign external 340MB drive that I think will work with it in place of those horrible ESDI drives.

Anyways, sorry to derail the thread. 😁

Brickpad wrote:

On a serious note, I have both 8086 and 80286 Models 30s. My 8086 came with a dead 20MB drive (no surprise), and missing floppy bezel. The 286 is complete, but it's the single 1.44MB variant (8530-E01). I have some SCSI cards and an old (Mac) NuDesign external 340MB drive that I think will work with it in place of those horrible ESDI drives.

Anyways, sorry to derail the thread. 😁

mine came with two 720k drives and i upgraded it with a CT1350B, some OTIVGA card, a NEC V30 and a LoTech XT IDE adapter and 256MB CF card 😀

anyway, back to topic:
i tried another IO card for which I had a sheet describing the jumper settings and voila, the floppy drive lights up and does something. I had to choose "special adapter" for the video card to get rid of the equipment configuration error message.

the floppy drive is spinning now, but it doesn't seem to read the disks properly. all i get is a boot error, like if there was no floppy disk inserted. is there anything else to be aware of? it could also be the drive itself, i didnt test anotherone yet, cause i'll have to get one from the basement first...

Might be a stupid question but did you setup your FDD type in your BIOS?

tayyare wrote:

Might be a stupid question but did you setup your FDD type in your BIOS?

did that. even tried to set it up as first and second drive. also tried to select 720k cause I wasn't sure what drive this is but after googling it was clear that it is a 1,44MB drive.

ok so now: the news!

floppy started to work suddenly. dunno what i did. nevermind.
now there's the next challenge: i've got a seagate ST3250A with 204MB but can't get it to work because the BIOS does not support custom type disks. I used a utility to read all supported drives with params from BIOS but non of them has nearly 200MB. The biggest one is about 100MB.

Any idea, besides updating or modifying the BIOS, which would require an EPROM + burner?

I guess there is absolutely no way to get a drive which matches to one of the hardcoded drive types. They are all reeeaally old and small.

Try EZ-Drive or OnTrack Disk Manager. They intercept the disk calls into the BIOS to get around size limits. Normally for the 504MB limit, but I think they might work here, too?

Edit: Are you saying it won't even boot if you just pick the largest size available? So long as it boots these programs should work...

jakethompson1 wrote:

Try EZ-Drive or OnTrack Disk Manager. They intercept the disk calls into the BIOS to get around size limits. Normally for the 504MB limit, but I think they might work here, too?

Edit: Are you saying it won't even boot if you just pick the largest size available? So long as it boots these programs should work...

I tried Seagate Disk Wizard but it stops booting at "Extended Memory Manager V1.05". Maybe because there is no extended memory? The board has only 512KB of memory onboard and that's it.

Which brings me to my next question. Is there a way to upgrade the memory on this board to.. lets say 1 or 2 MB?
Maybe with a LoTech card?

Are there substitute, modern memory chips to put on the mainboard? Or are the old ones easy to get? I never looked for such stuff because this is my first board which doesn't use SIMMs or DIMMs or such. I don't even exactly know which ICs to look for...

Would an XT IDE card from lotech work, to have a BIOS which recognizes more recent disks?

Thanks!