VOGONS


First post, by Fimbulvetr

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I decided to upgrade a 486dx2-66 I recently picked up. It came with no drives and no audio card, so I plunked in some stuff I had sitting around the house. Here is what I started with before I tried upgrading:

Motherboard: SER 486-VLA with 256 kb cache, ALI chipset, AMI bios
Video: 2 mb Cirrus Logic VLB graphics card
Audio: Edison Gold 16 ES688F audio card
RAM: 8mb 30-pin parity
Storage: Maxtor 80 mb hard drive, an old Hewlett Packard cd-rom drive, floppy drive, GOTEK floppy emulator.
Other: generic I/O IDE controller card, network card
Operating System: DOS 6.22

The 80 mb hd was plugged into the IDE controller card, the cd-rom was plugged into the IDE port on the audio card. The computer ran perfectly with this setup, but I wanted to add a second, larger hard drive because 80 mb doesn't go far. My options are a 8 Gb Maxtor HD, which was partitioned into four 2 Gb partitions with Win 7 or a 1 Gb CF card plugged into a cheap CF to IDE adapter. The motherboard BIOS detects the 8 gb hd and 1 gb CF. But then my problems begin... if I use the 8 gb hd as my second drive, only the first partition is mounted as D:, and the CD-rom is mounted as E:. If I remove the CD-rom, it still only finds the first partition. If I use the 1 gb CF card as my second HD, the CD-rom is not mounted.

Any advice as to what I could be doing wrong? The master/slave settings on the drives are set correctly. I have installed the Edison Gold 16 drivers. From what I can tell the drive geometry is set up correctly -- I checked it with whatIDE.

I also upgraded the RAM from 8 mb to 32 mb as I had some 4 mb simms sitting around, which went fine except SimCity 2000 overran the memory and reported negative memory, and was then unstable when I ran it. Is there really any use to having more than 8 mb of ram in this computer? I only intend on using it with 80's to early 90's dos software, and I have a Mac SE/30 I could plunk the 32 mb into. I'm thinking I may be better just going back to 8 mb ram.

Reply 1 of 6, by tpowell.ca

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How did you partition the drive?
Did you use FDISK from DOS 6.22 or some other tool?

Also make sure to only have ONE primary partition, with all other drives in extended partitions.

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Reply 2 of 6, by SW-SSG

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Fimbulvetr wrote:

... If I use the 1 gb CF card as my second HD, the CD-rom is not mounted.

I very often read such anecdotes from users of various CF-to-IDE adapters. More than likely it's the adapter that is the problem in this case rather than the problem being something in your setup.

Reply 3 of 6, by Disruptor

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Fimbulvetr wrote:

My options are a 8 Gb Maxtor HD, which was partitioned into four 2 Gb partitions with Win 7

Why did you use Win 7 to create partitions on this drive?
DOS requires proper CHS alignment. Windows 7 uses 1 MB alignment, but it can work with partitions created by DOS.
Perhaps you should delete all partitions on your 8 GB disk and recreate them using real DOS.
The second thing is that DOS can only work with one primary partition. All other partitions must be logical drives in an extended partition.

Reply 4 of 6, by Fimbulvetr

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I’ve had luck in the past with win7. I tried reformatting and partitioning under dos, that didn’t work well, so I tried maxblast 1. That was a disaster... it corrupted the MBR on both my drives. The computer wouldn’t even boot, just dumped garbage onto the screen and halted. In the end there was nothing I could do but reformat and start over as the maxblast repair utilities didn’t work. Bah.

Reply 6 of 6, by chinny22

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That's not uncommon, even with period hardware. Sometimes 2 drives just wouldn't get along.
Just try all the combinations,
Setting both as cable select
Setting one as Primary or slave and other device as cable select.
Moving one of the devices over to the primary IDE channel and leaving the anti social device by itself.

and 8MB is fine for a DX2-66, 16MB is probably the most it would possibly want if ever, any more is pure overkill (nothing wrong with overkill though)