First post, by Leety McLeet
- Rank
- Newbie
Hey guys. I need some help with one of my retro rigs. I'm hoping someone has some experience with this particular motherboard and perhaps the use of larger drives.
Basically the problem is IDE controller and/or HDD performance - or lack of it. The hard drive is shown as running in UDMA mode during start-up as well as in device manager, but everything seems to be super sluggish and the CPU maxes-out whenever the disk is being accessed.
Anyway, lets get to the specs:
- Aopen AX5T (Intel 430TX)
- Pentium 200 @ 200 MHz
- 32 MB 60 ns EDO memory
- S3 Virge 4 MB
- 3dfx Voodoo (Orchid Righteous 3D)
- ESS AudioDrive ES1869 (ISA)
- D-Link 530 TX
- 10 GB FUJITSU MPC-3102AT (primary IDE channel)
- Generic LG CD-ROM (secondary IDE channel)
- Windows 95 C (FAT 32)
So first of all I tried swapping the IDE cable out with an 80-conductor cable followed by 2 or 3 different versions of the Intel Bus Master drivers. No change.
Anyway, what with the hard drive being pretty old and obnoxiously noisy, I figured I'd try a newer, much larger drive. I updated the BIOS (from here: https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-AOpen- … X5T-R1-92-128GB), which claims to enable the use of up to 128 GB HDDs (with a few caveats). Despite trying a couple of known working 80 GB drives, the system fails to POST, hanging on HDD detection. I can still enter the BIOS, but altering the HDD options or running auto detection causes the system to freeze. The latter wasn't too surprising, as the readme does advise not to run the auto detection on drives larger than x GB). Using a larger drive isn't the end of the world since 10 GB is more than enough for this system, but it does mean that I can't eliminate the drive as the cause of the problem.
If anyone has any advice regarding this issue or how to get the larger drives working, I would be extremely grateful.
Retro Computer Enthusiast!