Good news, it boots, all it needs is a boot drive, likely will use an IDE to CF adapter and an OS, I'm thinking MS-DOS 5.0.

I love everything about that machine. Very jealous. Looks like you already have an ide controller so yes a cf to ide adapter is all you need. If it can boot off 1.4mb floppies all you need is a usb floppy drive off Amazon and you can make your own. If it can’t and needs to boot off the 5 1/4 you’ll need disks. The important thing is you need to format the cf card and install the OS on the machine itself, flashing them with windows always results in no boot scenarios for me.

See what your bios limit is before ordering the CF card, and keep the card size under that limit. Also that thing is just screaming for an original Soundblaster 🤣

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-05-28, 19:29:

I love everything about that machine. Very jealous. Looks like you already have an ide controller so yes a cf to ide adapter is all you need. If it can boot off 1.4mb floppies all you need is a usb floppy drive off Amazon and you can make your own. If it can’t and needs to boot off the 5 1/4 you’ll need disks. The important thing is you need to format the cf card and install the OS on the machine itself, flashing them with windows always results in no boot scenarios for me.

See what your bios limit is before ordering the CF card, and keep the card size under that limit. Also that thing is just screaming for an original Soundblaster 🤣

I have no idea if I can use just a IDE to CF adapter, the main issue I may run into is that my BIOS only allows me to select from Type 1 to Type 47 for the hard drive type, so I don't know if that will work, I could just spend the money on the
Texelec Lo-tech XT CF Lite Rev 2 which would bypass the BIOS. So I'm unclear if it would work. Here is my BIOS screen, it's pretty basic.

You can, that first card you showed is an IDE controller. You can plug the adapter straight into that, and your BIOS supports hard drives already. The XTIDE's are really for XT class machines that dont have a bios, it's an easy solution. But your IDE controller and bio should be fine. Whats the largest hard drive option you have? Is 47 a custom option where you can type in the specs?

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-05-29, 00:30:

You can, that first card you showed is an IDE controller. You can plug the adapter straight into that, and your BIOS supports hard drives already. The XTIDE's are really for XT class machines that dont have a bios, it's an easy solution. But your IDE controller and bio should be fine. Whats the largest hard drive option you have? Is 47 a custom option where you can type in the specs?

Type 47 is a hard drive type, I'm not sure what it means, but there is no way to set custom parameters for a hard drive. So far, I've seen people have issues with the standard adapter, and the answer to fix the problem is to use the XTIDE CF adapter since it would bypass the onboard BIOS, also there are other benefits with going this route including the size limit is gone for drive size, mind you, still need conform to DOS partition limits.

What I'm seeing:

Pierre32 wrote on 2023-05-29, 01:21:

What I'm seeing:

embeds.jpg

No idea why you are not seeing, but I went ahead and put the images in as attachments.

Yeah, weird if other people could see them! Anyway thanks for attaching. That's a lovely looking system.

gryffinwings wrote on 2023-05-29, 01:11:

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-05-29, 00:30:

You can, that first card you showed is an IDE controller. You can plug the adapter straight into that, and your BIOS supports hard drives already. The XTIDE's are really for XT class machines that dont have a bios, it's an easy solution. But your IDE controller and bio should be fine. Whats the largest hard drive option you have? Is 47 a custom option where you can type in the specs?

Type 47 is a hard drive type, I'm not sure what it means, but there is no way to set custom parameters for a hard drive. So far, I've seen people have issues with the standard adapter, and the answer to fix the problem is to use the XTIDE CF adapter since it would bypass the onboard BIOS, also there are other benefits with going this route including the size limit is gone for drive size, mind you, still need conform to DOS partition limits.

Got ya, that’s fair enough. I won’t pretend to be an expert on that system specifically. If the bios indeed won’t let you set the HD perimeters I can see why that would cause issues. An Xtide is certainly an easy plug and play solution, just a bit more expensive. And as for size you don’t need much on a 286 anyway. My 8088 system on the xtide has a 64MB card and that’s more storage than it will ever need.

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-05-28, 19:29:

I love everything about that machine. Very jealous. Looks like you already have an ide controller so yes a cf to ide adapter is all you need. If it can boot off 1.4mb floppies all you need is a usb floppy drive off Amazon and you can make your own. If it can’t and needs to boot off the 5 1/4 you’ll need disks. The important thing is you need to format the cf card and install the OS on the machine itself, flashing them with windows always results in no boot scenarios for me.

See what your bios limit is before ordering the CF card, and keep the card size under that limit. Also that thing is just screaming for an original Soundblaster 🤣

So, I've tried to boot MS-DOS 5.0 on a floppy using the program from "allbootdisk" to create the 3.5" floppy on my old Dell Dimension 4400 running Windows XP. When I tried booting from the 3.5" I get an error stating "No boot device available". So I am currently unsure of what I need to do, maybe unplugging the 5.25" floppy might do it. The BIOS has no option to set the boot device at all. If I have to use the 5.25" drive, I have no ability to make 5.25" floppies. Any advice is welcome.

gryffinwings wrote on 2023-05-30, 03:44:

FinalJenemba wrote on 2023-05-28, 19:29:

I love everything about that machine. Very jealous. Looks like you already have an ide controller so yes a cf to ide adapter is all you need. If it can boot off 1.4mb floppies all you need is a usb floppy drive off Amazon and you can make your own. If it can’t and needs to boot off the 5 1/4 you’ll need disks. The important thing is you need to format the cf card and install the OS on the machine itself, flashing them with windows always results in no boot scenarios for me.

See what your bios limit is before ordering the CF card, and keep the card size under that limit. Also that thing is just screaming for an original Soundblaster 🤣

So, I've tried to boot MS-DOS 5.0 on a floppy using the program from "allbootdisk" to create the 3.5" floppy on my old Dell Dimension 4400 running Windows XP. When I tried booting from the 3.5" I get an error stating "No boot device available". So I am currently unsure of what I need to do, maybe unplugging the 5.25" floppy might do it. The BIOS has no option to set the boot device at all. If I have to use the 5.25" drive, I have no ability to make 5.25" floppies. Any advice is welcome.

When you boot the computer one of the floppy drives should light up when it’s looking for a boot disk. If it’s the 5 1/4 then that one is currently set as drive A. You don’t change this in the bios you actually change it with the IDE cable. On your cable you should see connectors that have a portion of the ribbon that flips right before the connector. That is an A drive connector. Non flipped tells the bios it’s a B drive. You can usually just swap around the cable. Unless the board is old enough to have floppy a and floppy b ide connectors separate on the board with separate cables, if that’s the case then the solution is even easier.

Well, I finally got to play a game, The Secret of Monkey Island, I've been wanting to play this one on old gear ever since I heard the sound track on youtube.

First, the advice on swapping the floppy drives around was most helpful, that helped getting DOS installed. Two, the installation of a Packard Bell variant of the Aztech Sound Card was kind of odd, but ultimately I found that someone had the Packard Bell Forte16 drives and that worked perfectly.

And I believe in "No pictures, it didn't happen." So here's a picture of the game running, even got a CRT recently to play games properly.