Can't Boot from Compact Flash

Thanks! After many hours switching hardware and exploring what I can do with this computer, some learnings that perhaps will save someone else time down the road...

Storage

1) Using a Transcend industrial CF card does clear up the “Failed to set block mode” POST error. I used a small 1GB card that shipped fast. Now to find a bigger one or one of those disk-on-module devices...

2) Unfortunately I do not believe DMA mode is supported on the integrated PCI IDE controller. In W98SE, the DMA checkbox simply doesn’t appear. In Windows 2000, I can select DMA if available but it clearly indicates PIO mode is being used for both the boot drive and the optical drive. This is true regardless of whether I use a conventional hard disk or the CF card. I haven’t been able to find much information on when/where DMA for storage became an option. I have ordered a couple of Promise PCI controllers and will give one of these a shot when they arrive. As it is, in PIO mode, it’s hard to tell the difference between a HD and the SSD.

3) On a brighter note, this computer does support large partitions using Ontrack disk manager + Windows 2000, however even with Ontrack I seem unable to create a partition greater than 4GB that W98SE can do anything with. Still troubleshooting this.

4) I haven’t been able to get Ontrack disk manager to coexist nicely with Compaq’s System Configuration Utility. Not sure this is possible.

RAM

I can confirm that using compatible memory, the computer is absolutely fine with 144MB of RAM. This seems amazing for a desktop Pentium 90. W98SE and W2000 both seem to run well.... there’s a “CPU sluggishness” but not too much disk thrashing.

GPU

I’m having a hell of a time finding a PCI card that is stable on this thing other than the QVISION 2000+ PCI card I have now. That thing is rock solid. However a PCI Radeon 7000 shows no display on POST (or it displays POST BIOS but goes dark once the EISA config utility is run). one of the “new” eBay Rage XL 8MB PCI cards works but only as a standard VGA card... installing drivers or pushing the resultion results in BSODs. Maybe bad cards? I’m looking for a beefier option than the QVISION to try next.

Overall this has been fun... it’s kind of amazing how robust this computer is.

Swiego wrote:

I can confirm that using compatible memory, the computer is absolutely fine with 144MB of RAM. This seems amazing for a desktop Pentium 90. W98SE and W2000 both seem to run well.... there’s a “CPU sluggishness” but not too much disk thrashing.

Let me guess: you need SIMM 72-pin FPM with parity, right?
I tried non-parity, and the results were funny: BIOS memory test goes OK, Memtest86 and Memtest 86+ - both OK, pure DOS works OK, Windows 95 in safe mode OK, but in normal mode... instant "parity error" or similar message.

I’m having a hell of a time finding a PCI card that is stable on this thing other than the QVISION 2000+ PCI card I have now. That thing is rock solid. However a PCI Radeon 7000 shows no display on POST (or it displays POST BIOS but goes dark once the EISA config utility is run). one of the “new” eBay Rage XL 8MB PCI cards works but only as a standard VGA card... installing drivers or pushing the resultion results in BSODs. Maybe bad cards? I’m looking for a beefier option than the QVISION to try next.

I have successfully ran two cards:
* ET6000 with 4 MB MDRAM
* Virge VX with 4 MB VRAM + 4 MB DRAM

Grzyb wrote:

Let me guess: you need SIMM 72-pin FPM with parity, right?
I tried non-parity, and the results were funny: BIOS memory test goes OK, Memtest86 and Memtest 86+ - both OK, pure DOS works OK, Windows 95 in safe mode OK, but in normal mode... instant "parity error" or similar message.

Yes that’s exactly right. I first tried with regular 72-pin FPMs and had a number of issues, typically the RAM not being recognized but sometimes it was followed by hard locks. I had decent look searching for 32MB 70ns DIMMs with the 139973-002 or 149948-001 part numbers. They were cheap and plentiful.

I have successfully ran two cards:
* ET6000 with 4 MB MDRAM
* Virge VX with 4 MB VRAM + 4 MB DRAM

Interestingly last night I tried the Rage XL 8MB PCI card under Windows 2000 and it works great using posted drivers off the AMD website. All resolutions and color depths are excellent, and there’s a clear improvement in visual quality vs. the QVision card at higher resolutions. In WIndows 98 SE it BSODs every time when trying to force a driver update scan, and I can’t seem to find drivers clearly marked for W98SE anywhere... the ones on AMD’s website (and also Philscomputerlab) explicitly say Windows ME. I tried forcing the install of a Rage Pro W98 driver and that BSOD’d the system as well.

I’m not sure yet how to stress this video card in Windows 2000.... 3dmark2000 says it needs MMX instructions 🙁

If you want to avoid buying yet another CF card you can get another card reader, just as long as it has a jumper to set it to primary or slave.
It's just the OS that needs to be installed on a bootable card. Games, programs, etc wont care.

also if your duel booting between W98 and 2k i'd keep c:\ at 4GB or less if using win2k's boot loader.

Some updates for the peanut gallery (read: possibly useful information for future Deskpro XL user trying to bling it out)

Storage
- I’m more or less convinced the onboard IDE controller did not support DMA. I have not seen the option show up where it ought to in either W98SE or W2K using a number of various IDE drives I had on hand. However I picked up a Promise TX2 Ultra133 PCI card and it not only works splendidly with this computer, DMA seems to work great! I was able to flash to the latest BIOS without issue, and Promise’s excellent driver support even now is appreciated. Disk performance is amazing. I haven’t tried my fastest IDE drives yet, not tried whether the Promise might be friendlier with a Raptor + SATA-IDE interface adapter than the ancient on board controller was.
- Unfortunately the Promise controller isn’t any more friendly with my non-industrial SanDisk CF cards - various hangs particularly on soft reboots. I have a 16GB “industrial” card coming so I’ll try that when It arrives.
- I also picked up an Ultra66 and Ultra100 card in case the fastest Ultra133 might cause issues, but looks like that wasn’t necessary. I found a local seller on CL of a dirt cheap Adaptec Ultra133 card as well, however the manual that came with it mentioned “Pentium II” minimum requirements so I haven’t bothered trying it yet since the Promise works so well.

Video
- After more or less giving up on the Rage XL 8MB PCI card as an upgrade to my old QVision card, I managed to find a Diamond Viper V330 PCI card. It turned out to have 8MB RAM. This card, with W98SE drivers, works flawlessly! It’s obviously faster in W98SE than the Compaq card, and the video output clarity is markedly better. I haven’t tried it in W2K but expect it would work fine there as well. So V330 works great, Radeon 7000 does not work at all. Somewhere between those two is a “fastest” PCI card that’s friendly with a P90 and W98SE/W2K/DOS... I wonder now what card that is.

Network
- unfortunately this computer only has two PCI slots.... by adding the Promise controller, I had to pull the old D-Link PCI Ethernet card. I thought this should be no issue—I can use the onboard Ethernet right? So far no luck at all. It’s an AMD PCNET controller that’s integrated with an AMD SCSI controller on a single chip. W98SE appears to fully install drivers for it, and when connecting a cable I do get a link light on the switch side, but I do not get a DHCP IP address. I’ve tried toggling some of the card settings but they’re largely undocumented and unclear as to what they do. I tried fixed IP address but no luck. Kind of stuck on this one. I have an EISA 3Com Etherlink card but I have not been able to get it working under W98SE at all... I haven’t tried W2K however for which I believe there is driver support. Adding it is a pain, I have to re-run the EISA config each time. I could also toss in an ISA NIC... any suggestions/advise here would be welcome since working on this thing isn’t very fun without being able to transfer files over SMB.

Overall, progress being made!

You might be able to find the right drivers for the nic and scsi on Compaq's FTP ?

I have this computer running Windows 95 (though I haven't touched it much yet) and everything works ok so far

NIC drivers appear to install with W98SE without issue. After more troubleshooting I realized I made a mistake and with the default W98 driver install I’m able to get the machine on the network and at least ping other PCs. For some reason DHCP doesn’t seem to function properly with the AMD PCNET HW+default drivers; if I manually set IP/gateway then I can ping other PCs which is good enough for now. I cannot find any information on whether this is a 10 or 10/100 integrated NIC but based on link lights from my unmanaged switch it appears to be linking at 10mbps. Nor was I able to find out after some cursory searching whether DHCP support emerged at a certain HW/SW point that some aspect of this system predates. Wikipedia suggests the standard was ratified 1993 and formalized to a further extent four years later, suggesting that DHCP predates this computer’s onboard NIC but may not predate the somewhat newer D-Link PCI NIC board that’s was in the PC and had no such issues.

If so... well good to know!

Turning away from the NIC for a moment, I decided to try a larger, faster IDE drive. So far I’ve been using a Quantum Bigfoot TX 12GB drive. Why? Well it’s kind of cool, this big honkin’ 5.25” hard drive. I tried a WD600 (60GB IDE) I had laying around and the Promise controller won’t see it. Tried jumpering to force master, no luck. Tried a WD400 I also had, same issue - Promise controller doesn’t see this drive. I figured “hell I have the Ultra100 and Ultra66 that just arrived, let’s try that...” - got as far as the Ultra100 card and like its faster sibling, it sees the Bigfoot but not the WD 40GB and 60GB drives. So... thwarted again, and another thing to troubleshoot.

I’m realizing as I go on this journey that figuring out what will work is more or less a crap shoot when it comes to hardware of this era inter operating with HW that came 5-10 years afterward. Other than guessing based on MFG date, there is very little information out there to draw a clear conclusion on what HW will or will not work on a platform this old... hence trial-by-error ends up being the only effective option. It’s a little frustrating but I shall keep pushing until this Deskpro XL is the best version of itself 😀

Why not using scsi instead, it was made for that afterall ! 😁

As for DHCP, does it really need some kind of hardware support to be functioning ? I never had issues with any of my NICs so far (and actually I think mine detected my dhcp server without issues last time I used it)

Yeah agreed, using IDE drives on a machine with SCSI seems like of a waste, and despite popular belief, SCSI isn't that hard to understand once you get the basics:

• Each device in a SCSI chain must have its own ID (avoid ID 7 as it is often used by the SCSI host adapter/card), that means you can't have two or more devices sharing the same ID.
• The chain must be terminated at both ends, that means you must terminate the chain at the last device, and at the begining. Although some SCSI host adapters can terminate themselves.

When it comes to SCSI hard drives, either you can go for a SCSI2CF (or SCSI2SD) converter, but alas they aren't cheap. So you have the option of taking a crapshoot and buy period correct SCSI hard drives (risky) or instead buy a SCSI SCA80 hard drive (these can be obtained cheaply) and a SCA80 to IDC50/HD68/HD50 adapter (if you go this route, make sure that the adapter that you're getting have ID jumpers and termination resistors!).

Hi all,

Appreciate the feedback and it’s a good point. Since I am working to bring up two other vintage computers in parallel, neither of which had onboard SCSI, it was easier to work off a single source of potential replacement HW. And, I only have the original 535mb drive. However it’s A good point that I should explore using this interface instead. One hesitation I had was around what seemed like a scarcity of solid state SCSI options which is my desired end goal. That said, no harm in sourcing a couple of older drives and seeing what I can do on this other interface.

To give back some knowledge I dug up in terms of softpaqs-
Sp1664.exe v2.35 pc SCSI support for dos, win3.1, win95
Sp3642.exe final released BIOS (486W, 4/07/97)
Sp19619.exe v2.58 final System Configuration Utility with Deskpro/XL support. 4 disks.

I have [re]discovered the solution to the "1740-fixed disk 0 failed set Block Mode command" issue.

Turns out this error isn't just encountered when modern humans try connecting compact flash adapters to these computers. Our fore-bearers faced this scourge when connecting non-Compaq hard disks as well.

I know this because I discovered the lost sacred text of Softpaq SP0970, followed its teachings and found resolution. I am happy to report that my Deskpro XL 560 now happily boots from an 8GB CF Card (with system utilities installed), although it sees only 4GB. When you consider the vintage of these machines (1994)-- 4GB is an absurd amount of disk space.

So to recap:

• Compact flash adapters and cards work just fine, just use BLOCKMD.COM to disable block mode for the disk. The 1740 block mode error will go away.
• System Configuration can be installed onto the CF card.
• Disk size limit for the BIOS appears to be ~4GB.
• The Softpaq is attached to this post. It is a zip, which contains an MS-DOS Softpaq self-extracting executable. The executable extracts the mentioned command BLOCKMD.COM.

Recipe for booting Deskpro XL with a compact flash card as C:

Ingredients

• CF adapter
• "Industrial" CF card. (BIOS maxes out at 4GB, but larger cards work, extra space will be ignored)
• Set of Compaq EISA Configuration Disks
• Bootable DOS disk with FDISK, FORMAT, and BLOCKMD.COM on it.

Instructions

1. Install CF adapter with card
2. Boot with configuration disk
3. Allow system to detect new disk, save settings, reboot. (System will show the actual size of your CF card on the configuration details screen, even if it's larger than the 4GB limit it supports. This is okay.)
4. As system is rebooting, swap configuration disk with a DOS boot disk.
5. If you see the 1740 block mode error, just press F1 to continue.
6. Boot with DOS boot disk.
7. If you got the 1740 block mode error, run BLOCKMD.COM and turn off block mode for disk. (it has on-screen instructions)
8. Run FDISK and remove all partitions. This makes the CF card ready to accept Compaq system partition.
9. Swap DOS boot disk with configuration boot disk, reboot.
10. System now should no longer be showing 1740 error and is ready to accept system partition.
11. Boot with configuration disk.
12. Follow prompts, allowing configuration application to create system partition and copy all the files to CF system partition.
13. Swap configuration boot disk with DOS boot disk again, reboot.
14. System now has a system partition, and is ready to accept new primary partition.
15. Boot with DOS boot disk.
16. Run FDISK, create a new PRIMARY partition on the disk. Make sure you set it active. Reboot.
17. Boot with DOS boot disk.
18. Run FORMAT C: /S
19. Run FDISK /MBR (this was necessary to get a good MBR on my CF card)
20. Remove DOS disk and reboot.
21. System should boot to a C:\> prompt.

For as it was written long ago:

1Softpaq Solution:  SP0970
2File Name:	BLOCKMD.COM
3Title:  Allows the Enabling or Disabling of Block Mode, to allow non-Compaq
4        disk drives to function properly on Compaq EISA machines.
5
6_______________________________________________________________________
7
8
9CATEGORY:  Program
10
11EFFECTIVITY DATE:  10-18-94
12
13PRODUCTS AFFECTED:  EISA Machines
14
15OPERATING SYSTEM:  MS-DOS 5.0 or greater
16
17SYSTEM CONFIGURATION:
18
19        EISA Machines that give NON-System Disk on Non-Compaq hard disks, but
20        booting from the floppy can see the disk drive correctly.
21
22DESCRIPTION:
23
24        Not all drives have the ablity to do Block Mode, EISA System Config
25        sets the Block Mode bits for any drive installed.  BLOCKMD.COM allows
26        the enabling or disabling of the Block Mode bits to allow Non-Compaq
27        drives to function properly.
28
29
30HOW TO USE:
31
32        1.  Copy the program BLOCKMD.COM to a bootable floppy.
33
34        2.  Boot from the floppy.
35
36        3.  Run BLOCKMD.  Select Disable for each Non-Compaq drive that
37            does not function correctly.
38
39        4.  System will boot from the Non-Compaq hard disk (once formatted).
40
41
42        NOTE: Each time System Configuration is run this program will have to be
43              re-executed.
44
45SAMPLE PROGRAM OUTPUT:
46
47    BLOCKMD.COM V1.1 Copy Right Compaq Computer Corp. 1994
48
49    Block Mode for Disk 1 is Currently Enabled.   Enable/Disable (E/D)?
50
51
52EFFECTS ON YOUR SYSTEM:
53
54        Enables/Disables Block Mode as specified.
55
56
57Compaq Systems Engineering
58COMPAQ COMPUTER CORP. 10/18/94

This is gold for anybody working with a vintage XL system!
Amazing that you found that softpak in the mountain of online softpaks with nameless numbers, like a needle in a haystack a kilometer high.

bitslasher wrote on 2021-07-04, 08:12:

I have [re]discovered the solution to the "1740-fixed disk 0 failed set Block Mode command" issue.
--snip--

Wow! Thank you so very much for this info. I have a very ancient Compaq Deskpro 386/25M that I was trying to put a 16GB SSD into. The block error message brought me here and your ZIP file was a life-saver. The FDISK /MBR was another step I wasn't aware of. 👍🏽