Try the XT-IDE rom.

This can typically fix a lot of motherboard stupidity.

Or IDE Enhancer BIOS. It was installed on some IDE Enhancer cards (hence the name).
- I really like XTIDE BIOS, but earlier versions I tried didn't like Protected-Mode OSes (tried OS/2 and Win95 so far)..

Try another HDD. Or when doing setup delete all partitions and make new ones. You can also try fixmbr when doing recovery from XP CD. I assume something is wrong with MBR.

Jo22 wrote:

Or IDE Enhancer BIOS. It was installed on some IDE Enhancer cards (hence the name).
- I really like XTIDE BIOS, but earlier versions I tried didn't like Protected-Mode OSes (tried OS/2 and Win95 so far)..

I used the r598 and that worked fine with windows 95, it has a couple of hacks to help it work correctly with winodws 95.

kixs wrote:

You can also try fixmbr when doing recovery from XP CD. I assume something is wrong with MBR.

Or someone can give S0KILL a try to clear the first tracks completely (incl. track 0; beware of data loss though. Make backups first).

canthearu wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

Or IDE Enhancer BIOS. It was installed on some IDE Enhancer cards (hence the name).
- I really like XTIDE BIOS, but earlier versions I tried didn't like Protected-Mode OSes (tried OS/2 and Win95 so far)..

I used the r598 and that worked fine with windows 95, it has a couple of hacks to help it work correctly with winodws 95.

In MS-DOS compatibility mode or in native mode (uses esdi_506.pdr Protected-Mode driver ?) 😕
Afaik, Win95 often outputs a performance warning somewhere in control panel if only an int13h device is available.
I'm just asking, because Windows XP can't fall back to DOS for disk I/O as Win 9x can.

This should be in Marvin. This forum is for old Windows games on modern systems. Marvin, the Paranoid Android

Jo22 wrote:

In MS-DOS compatibility mode or in native mode (uses esdi_506.pdr Protected-Mode driver ?) :confused: Afaik, Win95 often outpu […]
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canthearu wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

Or IDE Enhancer BIOS. It was installed on some IDE Enhancer cards (hence the name).
- I really like XTIDE BIOS, but earlier versions I tried didn't like Protected-Mode OSes (tried OS/2 and Win95 so far)..

I used the r598 and that worked fine with windows 95, it has a couple of hacks to help it work correctly with winodws 95.

In MS-DOS compatibility mode or in native mode (uses esdi_506.pdr Protected-Mode driver ?) 😕
Afaik, Win95 often outputs a performance warning somewhere in control panel if only an int13h device is available.
I'm just asking, because Windows XP can't fall back to DOS for disk I/O as Win 9x can.

Win95 was using native protected mode drivers.

The Win9x IDE driver can refuse to use it's protected mode driver for the primary IDE channel if it doesn't see the drive in the CMOS. So there are 3 options to work around this:

a) Set the drive type to None in the system BIOS, and XT-IDE bios, if it detects it can, will manipulate the CMOS so the Win95 IDE driver is happy. I presume that older XT-IDE versions didn't have this workaround.
b) Set the drive type to something in the system BIOS, and as long as it doesn't crash and can POST, XT-IDE will detect the drive correctly and then replace the system BIOS routines for that drive.
c) Use the drive on the secondary, third or forth IDE channels. The Win9x IDE driver only interrogates the CMOS for the primary IDE channel, and will simply work fine on other channels.

This is all assuming you are using a normal IDE controller/adapter. If you are using an actual XT-IDE controller, then I don't think that controller has a compatible protected mode driver.

That's interesting. Just checked, r598 is available here and just a few months old.
That makes me wonder, what is IDE_Tiny.Bin good for and how much does r598 differ from good ol' v2 β3 ? 😕

PS: Also, would you please remember if you did use the 386 version or the normal AT version ?
- So far, I saw no need to use any 386 XTIDE versions, that's why I'm curious. 😀

I used the ide_386.bin version on my 486 that booted and ran windows 95 fine.

I used the ide_xt.bin version on my XT using the XT-IDE v4 board.

I only have 8K EEPROM chips, so i have not been able to try the large versions.

r598 is vastly newer. I don't think v2 B3 has the proper win95 fixes.

After much trial and error, I've given up on installing XP. I tried multiple drives and formats and I also tried EZ-Drive.

I like the suggestion for the ISA card, but I don't really want to invest anything into this project. I also think an ISA card IDE controller on a pentium II system is a little slow.

Anyway, I finally did have success installing windows 98 SE after the third try. Everything is working well, but there's one more thing I have to figure out with the partitions.
I don't know how I can get more than 2GB. I installed the system with FAT16 because I was trying to keep everything as old and small as possible to maintain compatibility with the BIOS (maybe it was stupid). The problem I face now is that I can't create an extended partition, convert the FAT16 to FAT32 and then enlarge the partition, or create another primary partition formatted with FAT32 and have 98 see it. The BIOS is limiting me to 8GB, but even so, I can't get more than 2GB. The converter for FAT32 built into windows just causes the system to halt at a blinking cursor and do nothing. Creating an extended DOS partition with fdisk for some reason assigns the letter D to the drive even though the CD is already D, so it doesn't work and I can't see the drive show up in windows. The stupid fdisk has no way of selecting a drive letter either. Does an extended partition have to be formatted the same as the primary? (ie if the primary is FAT16, can the extended be FAT32?) Finally, I used a third party tool to make a separate FAT32 primary partition about 6GB, but it doesn't show up in windows 98. So what can I do to get the remaining 6GB of space formatted.

No, I do not suggest using an ISA IDE controller.

I suggest using some kind of ethernet card, either ISA or PCI with a boot rom socket. On that boot rom socket, you install a compatible rom chip burnt with a copy of the XT-IDE bios and enable the ethernet boot bios. You will need to configure the XT-IDE bios to use your motherboard's IDE slots before burning it to your chip. You may already have an ethernet card in your retro PC you can use.

Then you can bypass the buggy bios hard drive implementation and booting routines and use whatever hard drive you want on the motherboard's IDE controllers.

In terms of performance, DOS performance might be bit slower if you are unable to get ROM shadowing working for the XT-IDE bios. But once WIn95 or WinXP loads it's IDE driver, XT-IDE bios no longer matters.

*moved*

canthearu wrote:

No, I do not suggest using an ISA IDE controller. […]
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No, I do not suggest using an ISA IDE controller.

I suggest using some kind of ethernet card, either ISA or PCI with a boot rom socket. On that boot rom socket, you install a compatible rom chip burnt with a copy of the XT-IDE bios and enable the ethernet boot bios. You will need to configure the XT-IDE bios to use your motherboard's IDE slots before burning it to your chip. You may already have an ethernet card in your retro PC you can use.

Then you can bypass the buggy bios hard drive implementation and booting routines and use whatever hard drive you want on the motherboard's IDE controllers.

In terms of performance, DOS performance might be bit slower if you are unable to get ROM shadowing working for the XT-IDE bios. But once WIn95 or WinXP loads it's IDE driver, XT-IDE bios no longer matters.

Oh, OK. So the XT-IDE BIOS on the Ethernet card can override the internal IDE controller? Right now I have a PCI Etherlink XL 3C905B. It appears to have a place to insert a chip. So is it a matter of finding a ROM chip on ebay or something and then booting a DOS floppy with that ROM loaded on it? Or is it more complicated than that?

This is the chip you need:

https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/eeprom-memory-chips/1276572/ (8kb EEPROM that will fit your card)

You should be able to flash the chip using your current ethernet. Put the ROM image you want to use, configure it using the xt-ide configuration program, save it, then burn it to your eeprom.

Make sure you enable the boot rom using the configuration software for the 3com card.

Edit: it doesn't override the IDE controllers, it just replaces the software that accesses your IDE drives during bootup and in DOS. (Int 13h bios routines and boot code. So boot order in the bios isn't going to work anymore, but you can hold down a key during XT-IDE bios boot to boot a floppy disk or alternative hard drive)

kixs wrote:

Try another HDD. Or when doing setup delete all partitions and make new ones. You can also try fixmbr when doing recovery from XP CD. I assume something is wrong with MBR.

I remember Compaq uses its proprietary CHS to disk size translation mode. "Bit shift" (or something like this) in opposite to standard LBA. Try to change translation mode in BIOS before installing, remove partition while installing, then create new.

If you want a quick and dirty way to get past the BIOS limitation of your motherboard, an alternative can be to use a PCI ATA133 controller card. I used a Silicon Image SIL0680 ATA Medley controller card in my Tualatin with a QDI Advance 10T motherboard (the BIOS of my motherboard doesn't see HDDs larger than 137GB and won't boot from them with the onboard IDE controller) and worked like a charm. The card should bypass your BIOS as it has its own BIOS, and in my system it allowed me to boot not only as SCSI in the BIOS boot order, but even as IDE0, since it is a full fledged IDE controller. Otherwise you can go SATA and use a Promise SATA150 TX2/TX4 if you want Windows 9x compatibility, or a Promise SATA300 TX2/TX4 if you plan to use XP only. In both cases you will need an F6 driver floppy disk, but I'm not sure about the SIL0680, since I never did a clean installation of XP on that controller, but the OS booted without issues after I disconnected the hard drives from the onboard IDE controller and connected them to the card.

canthearu wrote:

This is the chip you need: […]
Show full quote

This is the chip you need:

https://au.rs-online.com/web/p/eeprom-memory-chips/1276572/ (8kb EEPROM that will fit your card)

You should be able to flash the chip using your current ethernet. Put the ROM image you want to use, configure it using the xt-ide configuration program, save it, then burn it to your eeprom.

Make sure you enable the boot rom using the configuration software for the 3com card.

Edit: it doesn't override the IDE controllers, it just replaces the software that accesses your IDE drives during bootup and in DOS. (Int 13h bios routines and boot code. So boot order in the bios isn't going to work anymore, but you can hold down a key during XT-IDE bios boot to boot a floppy disk or alternative hard drive)

Just to be clear I have the 3C905B (not to be confused with the 3C509B that I see other posts on here about). https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/3Com_3C905B-TX
This has a 32-pin EEPROM and the one you linked is 28-pin. Will this still work or should I try to find a 32-pin?
Another thing to be clear about is that I already have access to the 8GB that most are using this BIOS to gain access to. Will this allow me the 120GB limit of windows 98?

...I did some more looking and I can't find a 32-pin EEPROM of the right capacity.

I found this link: http://www.han.de/~gero/netboot/archive/msg03623.html
...and it led me to this chip: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Atmel-AT29C512-12PC- … m4383.l4275.c10
It is 64KB though, so I think the 8KB of the BIOS image will have to be duplicated or something according to what I've read.

Anyway, maybe none of this is necessary if the 28-pin will work.

looking4awayout wrote:

If you want a quick and dirty way to get past the BIOS limitation of your motherboard, an alternative can be to use a PCI ATA133 controller card. I used a Silicon Image SIL0680 ATA Medley controller card in my Tualatin with a QDI Advance 10T motherboard (the BIOS of my motherboard doesn't see HDDs larger than 137GB and won't boot from them with the onboard IDE controller) and worked like a charm. The card should bypass your BIOS as it has its own BIOS, and in my system it allowed me to boot not only as SCSI in the BIOS boot order, but even as IDE0, since it is a full fledged IDE controller. Otherwise you can go SATA and use a Promise SATA150 TX2/TX4 if you want Windows 9x compatibility, or a Promise SATA300 TX2/TX4 if you plan to use XP only. In both cases you will need an F6 driver floppy disk, but I'm not sure about the SIL0680, since I never did a clean installation of XP on that controller, but the OS booted without issues after I disconnected the hard drives from the onboard IDE controller and connected them to the card.

I have a SIL0680 dual IDE RAID card that I already tried in the system. It detects the drive, but it won't boot from it.

Synaps3 wrote:

Anyway, maybe none of this is necessary if the 28-pin will work.

If the AT29C512 will work in it, the the 28-pin AT28C64 will work too. You will need to put it into the correct pins, leaving the top 4 pins empty, see attached datasheets:

http://www.jmargolin.com/rdy2k/29C512.pdf
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/doc0270.pdf

Compare the DIP pinouts, you will find that the 28 pin chips are pretty much the same as the bottom 28 pins of the 32-pin chips. You can even verify it by putting a multimeter to the top right pin of the socket, it will be 5 volts. Move the multimeter down 2 pins in the socket and that should also be 5V. You will notice on the 32-pin chip, this pin is left Not connected, as the board can power that pin with Vcc so it is compatible with the 28pin chips.