Intel486dx33 wrote:

Hard drive settings in bios do not hold after restart.
New battery, All other setting remain the same just the hard-drive settings do not hold.

What do you think could be wrong ?

Hi, maybe the "clear CMOS" jumper on the mainboard is set incorrectly ?
It's just a guess. I had it set myself to a wrong position a few times. 😊

Normally the WD drives have a fourth setting (in addition to Master, Slave and CS) called "Single Drive". I found that I need to set that in order to get them to work with older motherboards if there are no other drives in the same chain.

Drives with single drive setting that are gonna be alone on the cable need to have that setting used. I haven't had any luck with such drives otherwise.

If your cable has a blue connector, plug that end into the controller/motherboard.
If it has two drive connections, plug the black/far end of the cable to your drive.

Jo22 wrote:

Intel486dx33 wrote:

Hard drive settings in bios do not hold after restart.
New battery, All other setting remain the same just the hard-drive settings do not hold.

What do you think could be wrong ?

Hi, maybe the "clear CMOS" jumper on the mainboard is set incorrectly ?
It's just a guess. I had it set myself to a wrong position a few times. 😊

I don't see any "clear cmos" setting in the manual or motherboard.
I found an 8gb CF card I am going to try that with old IDE cables form 1993.

What is the difference between the IDE cables with fine wires and the IDE cables with thick wires ?

Now none of the IDE controllers want to work.
They will not work with CDROM , CF card adapter or Hard-drives.
I tried several and none will work so I am almost positive the IDE controllers are not working.
But the Floppy drive works fine.
See this photo and tell me what jumper “W1” is for ?
Also does anyone know if there is a Clear CMOS jumper on this motherboard ( lucky star LS-486e , rev. C ?
I need to know what jumpers JP19, JP13 and W1 are for ?

Intel486dx33 wrote:

What is the difference between the IDE cables with fine wires and the IDE cables with thick wires ?

80 wire IDE cables are required for UDMA33 (mode 2) or higher.
40 wire cables will normally limit the controller to lower speeds to prevent corruption.

jmarsh wrote:

Intel486dx33 wrote:

What is the difference between the IDE cables with fine wires and the IDE cables with thick wires ?

80 wire IDE cables are required for UDMA33 (mode 2) or higher.
40 wire cables will normally limit the controller to lower speeds to prevent corruption.

Actually, 80 wire IDE cables are needed for UDMA66.

UDMA33 works just fine with 40 wire cables.

Are 80 wire IDE cables compatible with old motherboards and old hard-drives ?

Normally they work fine, but it is always worth testing this, as I have seen some weird things when using retro computers.

Okay, So right now I need to ID these jumpers.
jumpers JP19, JP13 and W1. What are they for ?

Thanks, but what about JP19 ?

Okay, I tried this same setup with a different motherboard and same results.
So the problem is not the motherboard but either IDE ribbons, or CD, or floppy drive ?
The CDROM works fine when booting off a DOS boot floppy.
Floppy drive seems to work fine.
It’s just the hard-drive that comes up as a slave drive. But when I save setting in bios and restart from boot drive
And perform fdisk, No drive found error message appears.
The Hard-drive settings do not retain. So NO drive found.
I am confused. I have tried different motherboards, ribbons, and drives with the same results.

Any Ideas ?

Anyone have any Ideas what to try next ?
I have the same problem using 2 different motherboards ?

What is wrong with the IDE controller on my 486 motherboards ?
I have swapped out everything but that power supply and I still can’t get them to work.
The IDE ribbons I am using are 40-pin with only 2 connections. Motherboard and Drive.
I have my drives set to Cable select.
But the bios only sees my drives as Slaves ?
The CDROM and Floppy work fine. Just my Hard-drives are not working in Slave mode when I have the jumpers set to Cable Select. They will not work in Master setting alone.

You need to make sure the drives are set to single drive if they have that option, rather than master.

Other things:
a) If you have ANY known good working drive, you should definitely try it on these systems.
b) If you still have trouble, get yourself a copy of XT-IDE onto a rom chip, and put it on a compatible ethernet card. This does auto-detection of your hard drives and is compatible with mostly anything. I use this on my 486's to use nice, quiet 250 gig WD drives in them rather than nasty old noisy used period correct drives (well thats how I feel about the noise they make)

I don’t know what is wrong. I tried everything. I can’t get these 486 motherboards to work with these IDE drives.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I don’t know what is wrong. I tried everything. I can’t get these 486 motherboards to work with these IDE drives.

Everything?

Twice now you've been told that Cable Select will NOT work with a single drive on the cable if that drive differentiates between "Single" and "Master" settings, as your drive probably does. You haven't mentioned anything about trying that and just keep repeating that you set to Cable Select. Have you tried setting it to "Single Drive" instead of Cable Select?