Surely somebody must have the manual/configuration information for this card.

I really dislike trying massive numbers of different combinations to try to figure out what works.

The switch information at least would be helpful as there is not indication of what it actually does.

Aren't these DIP switches not for configuring the on-card ROM address like with the sidejr pro/plus versions?
I remember all relevant settings can be configured by entering the card's own configuration program.

Yeah, the card's BIOS is pretty extensive.

Just having issues getting everything working properly together.

The switches have to be for something. Maybe disabling certain things like the game port which is not in the BIOS.

I pretty much struggle to get the side jr. plus running properly...
It doesn't matter what I setup, the large disk support doesn't seem to work as expected fdisk always reports a disk size of 504mb sooo the int13h rom/cached bios part seems not to work
with my bios. the bios detects the card (cf card) correctly.. but this is another matter altogether... it seems IF the bios does not support some kind of translation this card also is ... useless ... :'(

got the manual here ... dip switches 1..4 :
1 2 3 4
0 0 0 0 = c800h = default
0 0 1 0 = cc00h
0 1 0 0 = d000h
0 1 1 0 = d400h
1 0 0 0 = d800h
1 0 1 0 = dc00h
1 1 0 0 = e000h
1 1 1 0 = BIOS DISABLED

Pin 4 toggles between :
0 IDE Address AD4h/AD8h/AD3Ch = default
1 IDE Address B4h/B8h/BCh

IF you get it running and using big hdd's which actually are read/writable in dos.... please let me know 😀

THX !

I'm still waiting on some functional IDE to CF adapters to arrive. Hopefully they will be here by next week so I can try again.

Thanks for the jumper info btw.

I use a delock one from several years ago. Also tried several CF cards from sandidsk, transcend, including industrial types with mlc/slc memory which actually are fixed disks (but this doesnt matter for dos anyways..).
On one board (abit an4r2 - ami 93) the bios detects the full 8 GB but fdisk would report a maximum size of 504 MB. Still format can format the fat32 partition just fine.. (IF I set them up on another machine).
On the other board (chaintech 486slb/4slb - award 94) the disks only gets recognized as being 2gb. - i also tried some winbond non bios controller - which makes the cf card disappear on the chaintech, but no difference on the abit one.
It seems it doesnt matter if you setup the HDDs in the bios, as a driver would pick them up by direct controller access - also it has no problem to find / access the disk if i do not setup them.
(idediag - which probably uses direct ide commands)
the > 528MB option makes no difference for me
BIOS should be shadowed when you use the Controller Bios option which "redirects" commands to int13h to the controller directly otherwise it will try to run through the bios functions of your board which is asking for trouble depending on what your bios is able to do.
Also the memory copied option should be fine when you do not want to enable shadowing.
Also both options should - in theory - fix the CHS limitation when accessing disk with the int13h routines - which in dos days should be the most often used method.
SO the manual says :
- >528MB enabled
- BIOS shadowed or memory cached
then you should be able to get beyond 504mb. I do not understand what the problem is fdisk is having... I know about the combinet ide bios chs problem, which should not be a problem as the Side bios should do the translation up till 8.x gb (non lba limit). also i dont get it, that you can access the whole drive while fdisk only sees 504mb...
At this point I'am very confused 😁

The manual also contains some loose pages about the 1.3/1.4 firmware versions to master the mighty jenglish.
First line on page 1 : 'In order to perform the most " user friendly " for the user. There are no jumpers' followed by a picture of the cards bios'
so you see... there are no jumpers xD ... just a dip switch 😁.. i had quite a laugh after reading the pages.

But to sum it up 1.3/1.4:
- optimize, tests different timings and tries to find the fastest settings which will PROBABLY not end in cathastrophic data loss and dooms day scenarios.
- if you enable the large disk option you MUST refdisk and reformat the drive - well i tried 🙁
- ATA2-mode 4 is supported (fully)
- >528 is default
- optimize also

I figured that it doesn't matter what the BIOS (PC not card) sees or shows you in the standard cmos setup... these values do not matter for the controller itself.
BUT if you setup a hdd it will be shown with this geometry in dos. So something is happening there... but at this point I cannot wrap my head around it.

Two days switching boards and adapters... well i now KNOW why my father always kept sheets of paper around running down cryptic tables of numbers and stuff until the pc worked again 😁
But I remember that the whole scsi stuff was majorly troublesome as well, and still is... I would switch IF the Cf adapters wouldnt be so much more expensive.

Next up : Trying to switch from ami to award, using a programmer, maybe using different bios versions and trying to find a version which does some kind of translation?!

cyclone3d wrote:

I've got an IWILL SIDE VLB controller that I am having trouble getting working properly.. or maybe I just need a smaller HDD. […]
Show full quote

I've got an IWILL SIDE VLB controller that I am having trouble getting working properly.. or maybe I just need a smaller HDD.

I haven't been able to find out anything at all about this card other than a picture in a different thread here on vogons.

There is a quad switch on the card and a bunch of options in the card BIOS. (normal mode non-block), (normal mode block mode), (mode 3 non-block), (mode 3 block mode).
I do have it set to allow larger than 528MB drives.

And to top that off, setting up the HDD in the motherboard BIOS is required as well. Do I want LBA, block-mode, and/or 32-bit access?

The smallest HDD I have is 13GB. The auto-detect in the BIOS detects it as 8.4GB which is fine with me, but it just sits at the initial POST screen and says "wait" if I set it up as that.

IF I set the drive type to ESDI in the BIOS, it works, but I only get 10MB.

Do I just need a smaller capacity drive to make it work? Or is there some combination of switch settings, card BIOS and motherboard BIOS settings that I need to make it work?

IWILL-SIDE.jpg

I have scanned and uploaded the manual to vogons drivers back in 2015.

Ok, so I think I am getting somewhere.

I did a bit of searching on using CF cards in old machines and ran across a post where somebody mentioned hooking it up to a newer machine, writing down the values that the BIOS detects and then using those settings in the older computer.

Turns out my 486 system was detecting the card with slightly different parameters than the P4 system I hooked it up to.

So I used those settings. Fdisk sees it correctly and is able to partition at this point. I made the first partition 500MB.

After that I rebooted and tried formatting with the /S option to transfer the system files to the drive. Well, it formatted, but said about 70% of the drive was bad sectors.

I ran another format with the /C option to check marked sectors and it unmarked them. It still said that the available space was the same, so I ran a chkdsk /f on the drive and it freed up that space.

Then I rebooted and it booted, but gave me a divide by 0 error, said MSDOS.SYS had something wrong with it and asked for the command interpreter.

So then I rebooted again and changed the IWILL IDE option to be mode3/block.

This time it booted up to the command prompt without an error but then hangs when I try to do anything including changing to drive a:

So then I booted back up via floppy and tried a format c: /q which went fine and then a sys a:\ c: which also went fine.

And then I booted up again via the CF card and it did the same thing again.

Wondering if I need to manually mess with the IDE timings in the IWILL BIOS. Seems like the controller is not liking the fastness of the CF card. Or maybe I need to mess with the I/O recovery time in the motherboard BIOS. 😕

Ok, got it working.. finally.

I disabled LBA in the BIOS and set the IWILL card to use the System BIOS for int13h.

I then had to format /s drive c: again.

Now it boots properly and doesn't hang.

Woohoo! 😎

I'm actually thinking of not using this controller and instead using one of my other VLB controllers.

Since this controller has SCSI on it, it is taking quite a while for it to get past the HDD detection screen.

Is this controller actually going to be faster than a run of the mill VLB I/O controller?

Same here.. by setting the controller to use the system bios inth13 method you totally skip the controllers firmware and its "features"
and let the system bios decide what to do. So you could in theorie replace the controller with any dumb non bios isa/vlb controller.

I got the CHS settings from a more modern system aswell... 8GB CF cards seem to identify all as being 15501 16 63 (tried sandisk and transcend models yet) if I remember correctly.

If you get the card recognised correctly by skipping the controllers bios or at least CAN fdisk it to full size, the cards bios would not be needed anyway.
I also stumbled accross those system hang ups while changing to a: and format errors, mostly by changing the recognized CHS values to my own values
- even when using relatively save values for a 504MB drive it wouldn't work.. or it wouldn't work after a reboot.

In the meantime I started using ontrack, which runs fine... but slow 😁 and now I'am playing around with some eeproms, NICs and xtide 😁
I'll update on any success... but still the controller is a waste of time IF the original bios can't handle CHS/LBA translation by itself,
I think the big hdd support simply is meant for communicating with bigger drives not for tranlating it to the systems OS ..

If XTIDE is a success, I'll probably flash the rest of my chinese LOT eeproms and take them up for sale on ebay germany / maybe on nics, when
I can get a hold of a bunch cheap realtek ones... - which actually run really well.

IF you or someone else has general interest in such a card or eeprom and no one to flash those eeproms, let me know. 😀

hm maybeeee ... someone could simply swap the sides' eeprom with the xtides' one making it useful 😁
but as it uses an eeprom it probably saves its settings in it making it more difficult to embed the settings into xtide, if even possible ...
just an idea

EDIT : oh well... four years too late 😀
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?434 … BOOT-ROM-socket

Hi.

I found this card today in an electronic junk shop, but the bios and terminate resistors are missing on my card.
Where is the bios dump available?

It's on Vogonsdrivers, but the site is down today--

IWILL SIDE IDE/SCSI VLB controller BIOS V1.3E

http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1908

edit: the site is back up