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XT-IDE BIOS, partially working?

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First post, by Maxxarcade

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I'm working on an old Compaq Presario 850 that has a Pentium Overdrive installed. The issue was large drive support not working, since the system has a 1993 BIOS. I found out about XT-IDE, and decided to try it this past weekend.

I was able to program a 28C64 with the XT-IDE bios version 2.0.0.3 beta 3 (8KB AT file) and put it on an old 3Com network card. It will show up during boot and detect the drive, but Windows 98 FDISK still identifies any drive as no larger than 503MB. The odd thing is that FDISK notifies me that the drive is large, and asks me if I want to enable support for it. Without XT-IDE, it doesn't prompt me to enable large disk support.

I tried a newer version of XT-IDE that was from 2015, and for some reason it doesn't sense the keyboard input to boot from drive A or C, but it will detect if I press the key for serial or ROM boot. When it goes to boot, the computer gives a beep and message about a partition table error and halts.

Also, the XT-IDE auto-configure function in the setup program says that no controllers are detected. I ended up just programming the image without running the configuration. The system only has 1 IDE controller onboard, and I'm not sure whether it is VLB or ISA based.

What is the latest confirmed working version of XT-IDE? And I'm curious if anyone else has gotten it working on an old Compaq. The BIOS on these is not very forgiving, and there doesn't seem to be any way to disable hard drive auto detection. For example if I manually set it to Type 1, it will just set itself back to Type 65 on the next reboot. Telling it to Ignore Changes makes no difference.

Reply 1 of 2, by Malvineous

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Do you have a non-US keyboard layout? That could explain why the keys for booting don't work as XT-IDE will be looking for key codes rather than characters.

There should be no conflict with an existing BIOS, as XT-IDE replaces the BIOS calls. When programs call the BIOS they end up speaking to XT-IDE instead of the real BIOS. I've used it before to properly support LBA mode in early 486 BIOSes that used the wrong translation functions which prevented the disk from being interchangeable with modern PCs. The hard drive type setting in the BIOS is ignored by XT-IDE so it won't matter what it's set to.

If you programmed the image without configuring it first, are you sure it had the proper settings? It could be looking for an XT IDE controller instead of an AT one, for example.

Reply 2 of 2, by Maxxarcade

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I found that the BIOS on the motherboard is still taking some effect even though the XT-IDE BIOS loads and displays the hard drive on bootup. For example if I set the motherboard BIOS to type 1, FDISK formats the drive as 241 MB. If I let the computer do auto detection, I get the 504MB limit.

My keyboard layout is standard US. The boot hotkeys work fine in the earlier Beta 3 version of XT-IDE, but not in the 2015 version.

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