VOGONS


First post, by petieken

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I'm stuck trying to boot from a CF card (Sandisk Extreme III 8GB) connected to a Promise Ultra66 mounted in my Asus PVI-486SP3.

The Ultra66 card is detected properly and I get the Promise BIOS screen, the card is also detected in UDMA4. I have booted from a floppy and partitioned the card with FDISK, and installed MS-DOS 6.22 without problems.

The problem is my system hangs where usually "Starting MS-DOS..." comes up, the message doesn't come up and the cursor just blinks there...
When I boot from a floppy I can access the card, and I can run software from it no problem. I ran speedsys and the results seem pretty good (about 25MB/s read speed, the card is rated 30MB/s). I just can't seem to boot from it. The CF-IDE adapter also has DMA connections wired between IDE and CF.

I have tried an old 512MB card too, and Promise detects it as PIO2. I installed MS-DOS and the system boots fine from this old card. I have also tried a Kingston 16GB card, and this was also detected as UDMA4. But, no booting from this card also.

I have disabled all onboard IDE stuff, disconnected the CD-ROM, removed all cards except VGA card and Ultra66 card. I have also tried updating the Ultra66 BIOS with version 2.0 from the Promise website.

Any ideas what else I could try?

*Asus PVI-486SP3 | Am5x86-133 | 32MB | Promise Ultra66 | 8GB CF | S3 Virge/GX 4MB | SB Pro2 | GUS Classic | Roland MPU-IPC-T
*Gigabyte GA-7S748 | 1GB | GeForce FX 5950 Ultra | Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
*Roland CM32L | Roland SC-55mkII | Yamaha FB-01

Reply 2 of 4, by petieken

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It's somewhat working, but I wanted DMA transfers and the possibility of a adding a larger card than 8GB BIOS limitation.
My 8GB card is also not working well with onboard IDE (same booting problem), but access is fine when I boot from floppy.

It's like this motherboard does really not want to work with DMA on CF cards. I have also tried an old Ultra ATA33 HDD and this works ok.

*Asus PVI-486SP3 | Am5x86-133 | 32MB | Promise Ultra66 | 8GB CF | S3 Virge/GX 4MB | SB Pro2 | GUS Classic | Roland MPU-IPC-T
*Gigabyte GA-7S748 | 1GB | GeForce FX 5950 Ultra | Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
*Roland CM32L | Roland SC-55mkII | Yamaha FB-01

Reply 3 of 4, by petieken

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Nevermind, I was going through my old notes and found I've done "fdisk /mbr" to get the old 1GB card running in the past.

Both the Sandisk Extreme III 8GB & Extreme IV 4GB work fine now.

The Kingston Elite Pro 16GB still doesn't work, but now I get the "DISK BOOT FAILURE" message instead of nothing. I tried "format c: /s" again from both the MS-DOS 6.22 floppy and Win98 floppy. Does anyone have any tips to get this 16GB card running?

*Asus PVI-486SP3 | Am5x86-133 | 32MB | Promise Ultra66 | 8GB CF | S3 Virge/GX 4MB | SB Pro2 | GUS Classic | Roland MPU-IPC-T
*Gigabyte GA-7S748 | 1GB | GeForce FX 5950 Ultra | Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
*Roland CM32L | Roland SC-55mkII | Yamaha FB-01

Reply 4 of 4, by matze79

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install the card with DDO, Ontrack or Maxblast, it will boot.

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