Make sure the cable red stripe is lining up with pin 1 (one) on the connectors, both on the disk and the board.

As for the CDROM you say it is IDE but not having a master/slave jumper makes me think it's something else with a 40pin connector. What is the brand/model of the CDROM?

You need to connect the floppy after the twist in the cable if you want to use that as drive A: so both end-connectors. Otherwise it is drive B:

Oh and that appears to be the 430/440/440T board:
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/430.htm

Not yet in UH19 afaik

evasive wrote on 2021-04-28, 11:38:

Make sure the cable red stripe is lining up with pin 1 (one) on the connectors, both on the disk and the board.

As for the CDROM you say it is IDE but not having a master/slave jumper makes me think it's something else with a 40pin connector. What is the brand/model of the CDROM?

You need to connect the floppy after the twist in the cable if you want to use that as drive A: so both end-connectors. Otherwise it is drive B:

The floppy is connected after the twist, I did wonder if I had my cable backwards, but I tried both orientations (end that plugs into the board has a pin blanked so will only go in one way. I'll try another cable after work, I've got one that just has the one connector and doesn't have a 5.25" connector on it, will see if it makes any difference.

The CD-ROM is an Optics Storage Dolphin 8000 AT, if it's not actually IDE, would that mean I need to connect it to one of the connectors on the soundcard? Would I regular IDE cable work for this purpose?

evasive wrote on 2021-04-28, 11:42:

Oh and that appears to be the 430/440/440T board:
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/430.htm

Not yet in UH19 afaik

That's very helpful, I was wondering about polarity for an external battery.

As far as UH19 I can't dump roms but I can take some pictures for sure.

This https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/OPTCD.html suggests that the 8000AT should use the Sony 34 pin interface, which I think was found on some soundcards. I've got an SB16 which has a 40 pin MKE bus interface on it. The cable that came with it had a 40 pin connector at one end, and at the other end had both a 34 pin connector and a 40 pin connector. So I guess the same cable could be used to connect a Sony drive to a Sony interface, or an MKE drive to an MKE interface.

Does your CD drive have a 40 pin connector?

Comes with its own interface card:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/8tMAAOSwraNf4c~e/s-l1600.jpg
which is 34-pin

evasive wrote on 2021-04-28, 12:25:

Comes with its own interface card:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/8tMAAOSwraNf4c~e/s-l1600.jpg
which is 34-pin

Huh, CDROM audio out on the back panel. So not Sony 34 pin then, don't think that has any analogue audio and I don't see anything that looks like a DAC there.

That would all make sense then. I made the incorrect assumption that the machine would have been in a working state before it was retired, but evidently not. That being the case, the sound card does have a 34 pin Sony connector, would connecting these two with an IDE cable work? Otherwise I'll just swap it for an IDE CD-ROM drive. I have one kicking around.

It may work as long as you line up the pins properly. However, it may not fit on the CDROM side. Then you would need to use a floppy cable (which is 34 pin) but make sure there's no twist in it in between the connectors.

The IDE cable does fit in the drive (which was the big reason I thought it was IDE initially), so I'll give that a whirl and see what happens.

Update:
CD-Drive didn't work not that I'm terribly surprised. I found out that the tray mechanism doesn't work anyway so not a big loss.

No luck at all with the floppy. Tried another cable, again with both the drive that came with the machine and one I know works but same symptoms, shows every indication it's going to work (lights up, makes noise) but DOS still says "Not ready reading drive A". I guess the floppy controller is toast?

I'd make sure the floppy settings are correct in the bios. I'd just double check it's set for 1.44mb and not 1.2mb,720k, 360k ECT.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-28, 18:50:

I'd make sure the floppy settings are correct in the bios. I'd just double check it's set for 1.44mb and not 1.2mb,720k, 360k ECT.

Yeah, they're correct. Had to set them every time I turned it on since I removed the battery. Just for the heck of it I tried disabling the A drive and setting the B drive to 3.5" 1.44MB but as expected that just gave a diskette error on startup.

I'd get a battery hooked up. I have had a ton of boards that either refuse to post or just act really weird if the batteries are dead,missing, or low.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-28, 18:58:

I'd get a battery hooked up. I have had a ton of boards that either refuse to post or just act really weird if the batteries are dead,missing, or low.

I've got one connected now. Rigged up a CR2032 holder connected to an old 4-pin fan connector this afternoon. It's saving the settings now, I'm not sure that it's saving the time. But I can't actually figure out how to get into the BIOS settings except when it prompts me to because of some misconfiguration.

I googled and I found for Packard Bell's of this era hitting control+alt+s was a very common combination to enter the bios.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-28, 19:41:

I googled and I found for Packard Bell's of this era hitting control+alt+s was a very common combination to enter the bios.

Aha, yes that did it! It is indeed saving the settings but not the time.

However, now yet more issues have cropped up! I'm getting characters swapped around on screen, which I believe would be a RAM issue?

https://imgur.com/TN3Jlsh

video memory i think, do you have an option to use a different video card?

evasive wrote on 2021-04-30, 07:19:

video memory i think, do you have an option to use a different video card?

I don't have any other ISA cards, but I can always remove the ATI and reenable the onboard video. I'll try that tonight, I was planning to poke around with my multimeter to check for continuity around the floppy connector as well, but I'm not super sure what to troubleshoot there other than making sure all the pins go somewhere.

No issues using the on-board video, which is a Cirrus Logic GD-5424, from what I gather this is probably better than the VGA Wonder 16 card anyway.

I verified that all pins on the floppy connector have continuity to the IO chip, but not much I can do beyond that without a schematic for this board which I've not been able to find. At this point it looks like I'll have to invest in an ISA floppy controller, at least I have a working CD drive I can use to transfer files to the machine.