I‘m afraid the answer is 4x no…

Try another i/o controller then.
Is ISA speed set properly?
What is your settings for jumper jp3 (I can't see it clearly on the photo).

JP3 is set at 1-2 closed, which means >25MHz. I didnt alter any jumper setting and the system ran wel when it was stored many years ago.
Now I need to find another i/o card then.

Order a xt-ide rom/ide or cf combo card. They are pretty handy. Order one with a rear i/o bracket if you are worried about accidentally putting it in backwards.

here is one with ide and cf

But you would prob still use your external 16 bit.

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-24, 13:29:

JP3 is set at 1-2 closed, which means >25MHz. I didnt alter any jumper setting and the system ran wel when it was stored many years ago.
Now I need to find another i/o card then.

Does the CMOS setup have any settings about ISA bus divider though.At 50 MHz it should be 1/6. This would of course have been lost when the battery died.

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-23, 05:20:

This just keeps scrolling

Where this photo come from exactly ?
This reminds me of a very old case, where one of the two BIOS chips had a slight problem... and it bugged the machine the same display way.
I had to replace the chip #2 with a new eeprom to solve this problem.

That photo was what happened after getting the controller failure and hitting F1. System tried to boot from the a: drive.
I never knew about that clock setting in the bios. There is something called Bus Clock Frequency Select, that was set to 1/4 ACLK. Changing it to 1/6 still gave me the controller failure message though.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-09-24, 20:37:

Order a xt-ide rom/ide or cf combo card.

Never heard of that. If I understand it correctly, it’s used for large drives on old computers?

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-25, 06:44:

That photo was what happened after getting the controller failure and hitting F1. System tried to boot from the a: drive.
I never knew about that clock setting in the bios. There is something called Bus Clock Frequency Select, that was set to 1/4 ACLK. Changing it to 1/6 still gave me the controller failure message though.

Can you boot from a floppy drive?

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-25, 06:44:

That photo was what happened after getting the controller failure and hitting F1. System tried to boot from the a: drive.
I never knew about that clock setting in the bios. There is something called Bus Clock Frequency Select, that was set to 1/4 ACLK. Changing it to 1/6 still gave me the controller failure message though.

Hello, oh yes.. I had also the same kind of issue in the past with an MORSE mother board.
Everything worked perfectly except for the floppy disk drive.
I could only do small commands like "dir" and that's all.
Everything else, including launch prog, booting from the diskette, was causing a freeze with glitches on the screen, with ASCII characters here and there sometimes with colors...
I had tried almost everything I think (jumpers, crytsal, versions, bios, different controller, etc), but I had never managed to solve this problem.
An I saw someone once who had the same problem with this motherboard and his solution was "It's ok I put another controller card and there it's inexplicable but it works.". But this little trickster, did not leave the name of the model...
In short, courage and if you find thank you to tell us how you did 😀

Can’t boot from floppy, it says Drive not ready error.
As soon as I power on the system, the lights on both the a: and b: drive come on - and stay on.
Well I just bought another i/o card, shipping will take a couple of days though.

If light stays on on both drivers it suggests that cable is plugged wrong way. Sorry for asking, but did you try to swap drives on both cable ends?

Ha! I actually plugged in the a: drive the wrong way. Not that it makes any difference, the system still says Drive not ready.

Are the drives plugged to proper cable ends?

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-25, 06:53:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-09-24, 20:37:

Order a xt-ide rom/ide or cf combo card.

Never heard of that. If I understand it correctly, it’s used for large drives on old computers?

It is a bios that kinda takes over the ide on systems that have glitchy old ide bioses.
They often come with their own cf slots and ide ports.

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-25, 14:50:

Ha! I actually plugged in the a: drive the wrong way. Not that it makes any difference, the system still says Drive not ready.

Are there any settings in the BIOS about cache wait states? Or can you temporarily disable your 256K external cache?

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-09-25, 21:59:

Kouwes wrote on 2022-09-25, 06:53:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-09-24, 20:37:

Order a xt-ide rom/ide or cf combo card.

Never heard of that. If I understand it correctly, it’s used for large drives on old computers?

It is a bios that kinda takes over the ide on systems that have glitchy old ide bioses.
They often come with their own cf slots and ide ports.

Seems like it’s plug and play? Just insert the card, plug in your hdd and cd-rom and you’re good to go?
I found the one with the bracket on ebay. I’m going to buy that one, for easy CF card access.

There are some bios settings for wait states but I don’t know about the cache - I’m not at home right now.

Yeah, it’s pretty easy. There are settings but I haven’t messed with them much.

You should focus on getting the floppy to boot without any hard drive or CDROM installed at first. Verify all floppy cables are connected the right direction AND that the A: drive is on the twisted part of the cable.

Make sure the bus divider is set to 1/6 as previously mentioned, if the video is still freaking out after this - you may have a bad video card.

This motherboard is worth the effort to get working, that chipset is an absolute monster and 50MHz will make it fly.

Update:
Took awhile but I finally got another controller card. But still the same error: HDD controller failure. Well, I‘ve had enough, going to dump this pc in the basement or probably sell the parts.