Hello all,

I'm trying to revive my old Olivetti M300-04, a 386SX compatible PC clocked at 20Mhz with 1 Mbyte on board ram, and expanded to 5 Mbytes (4x1 Mbyte 30 pin simms) back in the day.
In fact, I already did it. It runs well but the old 40Mb hard disk is slooooooow and a little bit tiny. I remember struggling to fit some games in it back in the early nineties, so I switched to a 256 Mb compact flash (enough for now) with the addition of the proper ide to cf adapter and... It didn't work because of the f*ck*ng limited BIOS.
This BIOS only supports three types of hard disks, 40Mb, 85Mb and 120Mb, and you can't configure any other parameter... no heads, cylinders nor sectors can be entered in any way...
Ok, no problem... I have an ethernet card (3com 3c509 isa card) with a rom socket that I planned to use on this machine, so I programmed a 27C128 eprom with XT-IDE, configured the card to enable the boot room at D000, and...
Bingo!!! It worked!!!
Now I can boot from the cf without any problem. I've installed the operating system into the cf (freedos by now, maybe I'll switch to ms-dos later if I found problems), configured mtcp and now I can easily upload any program or game to the machine from the network.
Everything seemed to work well, but... I plugged a PS2 mouse to the computer and it froze just right after checking the floppy drive, just before booting from the cf (or the hard drive, I tried)...
The mouse is for sure working, I tested it on another machine, and tested several other mice on this machine with the same result.
I know the machine is ok because I removed the XT-IDE rom (actually I disabled it with the ethernet configuration tool) and it booted fine (from floppy, the cf doesn't work without XT-IDE), and even loaded the mouse driver just fine.
So I think the culprit is the XT-IDE rom that somehow messes up with the mouse and keyboard controller in some way, so the question is:
Have any of you had this issue with XT-IDE?, and if so: How did you address that?

Here are the specs of the machine for you to now:

Originally:
- 386SX @ 20Mhz
- 1Mbyte of ram
- VGA video card based on WDC90C11 with 256K of ram
- 3 1/2'' 1.44Mb floppy drive
- 3 1/2'' 40Mb hard disk drive, ST351A/X from Seagate

Upgrades (most done in the past):
- 4 Mbytes of ram (4x1Mb 30 pin simms), reaching a total of 5Megabytes
- 256Kbytes of extra video ram (regular dip dram chips), so 512Kbytes in total (640x480 in 256 colors, yipee!!!)
- Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 (ct1600?) sound card (I also added a Sony CDU-33A 2x cdrom back then, but it's not present now)
- 3com 3c509 ethernet card

P.S.: I don't know if is there a XT-IDE support forum anywhere, or a dedicated thread here, if such exist I'll appreciate if someone point me to that. In fact I encountered a bit confusing the project page and I spent a lot of time seaching for the binaries and tools.

Edited:

This is how the machine looks now, in case you wonder.

It needs a lot of cleaning yet, and of course this is not the original monitor. I still have the original CRT monitor, but it takes a lot of space so by now it's stored.