Personally I prefer IDE hard drives, but this has been done many times before. If a hard drive is out of the question, CF is your best bet.

And CF needs only around signal voltage to power, but buy what you think will work, and do your homework.

I can tell you how I installed an 600/640 mb harddrive in my 80286, that came with MFM harddrive and an old Pheonix BIOS.
I used these following parts and software.

- Standard 16 bit IDE controller. (Non Enhanced and not buffered)
- Standard IDE harddrive at 600 to 640 megabyte in size. (non ultra ata, just plain old IDE drive)
- A dynamic drive overlay, that are compatible with the drive manufactor

First, I set the BIOS at the highest number. This is a fixed number, because the BIOS/PC is so old, that there is no user-defined one for heads, tracks and what not. So basically set at typpe 47 in the Phoenix BIOS. Then I disabled every port on the IDE controller, except the IDE ports. This is because the ports are present onboard on the 286 machine. Even the Floppy. So yeah... Disabling ports in order not to get conflicts.

Did all the hardware installation, and finished it off by installing the Dynamic Drive Overlay. This will correct the conflicts between the harddrives size and the harddrive type, that were set in the BIOS. And finished it off by installing MS-Dos 6.22 on my 80286 with 640 kb Ram.

I bet you can do this with allmost any type of CF cards, up to one gigabyte or something like that. Perhaps just install a 512mb card, because you know, how much software that are large in size, can a 286 use anyway. 😁

EDIT:
If you have trouble sourcing a harddrive, then you might be able to use a Seagate drive at the size of 120gb as the standard size, you can then modefy the drive size, using Seatools LIVE cd on something like a P4 machine and set the size to 512mb. This is only a thought I have, as I have only modded them from 120gb to 32gb, for use in old Socket7 systems that can not use larger drives than 32gb or something like that.

OK thank you both and for your very detailed reply Brostenen 😀

The 286 was still there today so I snagged it (yay!, maybe I will post pictures if I do not blow it up by accident 😜) but I see that it has 1MB of protected memory (640k base memory with 384k expansion with chips in motherboard) but I would like to add more if possible as all the chip slots are filled up with memory. Looking on eBay I see ISA memory expansion cards XMS that have 2MB but it says that it is designed for the 8088 and XT computers.

Would these cards still work in the 286? and does it matter if the card is 8 or 16 bit ISA? (the slots themselves are 16bit)

c64z80 wrote:

OK thank you both and for your very detailed reply Brostenen 😀

The 286 was still there today so I snagged it (yay!, maybe I will post pictures if I do not blow it up by accident 😜) but I see that it has 1MB of protected memory (640k base memory with 384k expansion with chips in motherboard) but I would like to add more if possible as all the chip slots are filled up with memory. Looking on eBay I see ISA memory expansion cards XMS that have 2MB but it says that it is designed for the 8088 and XT computers.

Would these cards still work in the 286? and does it matter if the card is 8 or 16 bit ISA? (the slots themselves are 16bit)

I myself am a bit stumped on how those work. There are tons of resources, Wikipedia may be your friend here.

Thanks.....
Regarding the mem cards. I have no idea on how they actually work. I think that there should be at least one Vogon user that knows how they work.

You might want to do a seperate tread on this or simply search Vogons for more information. There has to be at least something here.