I'm guessing the failure to load the operating system is due to the geometry taken by XUB being different from the geometry the drive was previously partitioned with.

Chances are, if you boot with a dos 6 floppy, that you can access the disk and see all the files, yet booting from it will be a bit more work...

weedeewee wrote on 2024-03-12, 16:29:

I'm guessing the failure to load the operating system is due to the geometry taken by XUB being different from the geometry the drive was previously partitioned with.

Chances are, if you boot with a dos 6 floppy, that you can access the disk and see all the files, yet booting from it will be a bit more work...

Interesting. I've looked over documentation on the XUB a lot and now that I think about it, I've never heard about a way to access a BIOS menu in the same way that you would access the menu for a stock BIOS for example - the menu to change a bunch of different settings. Perhaps my next thing to try will be using XTIDECFG again but I will manually enter the CHS values for this CF card (it's only 512MB) and see what happens.

geiger9 wrote on 2024-03-12, 16:47:

weedeewee wrote on 2024-03-12, 16:29:

I'm guessing the failure to load the operating system is due to the geometry taken by XUB being different from the geometry the drive was previously partitioned with.

Chances are, if you boot with a dos 6 floppy, that you can access the disk and see all the files, yet booting from it will be a bit more work...

Interesting. I've looked over documentation on the XUB a lot and now that I think about it, I've never heard about a way to access a BIOS menu in the same way that you would access the menu for a stock BIOS for example - the menu to change a bunch of different settings. Perhaps my next thing to try will be using XTIDECFG again but I will manually enter the CHS values for this CF card (it's only 512MB) and see what happens.

oh, I was referring to the hard drive.

If you made a clean install on an empty CF, then either try fdisk /MBR
or just erase the partition from the CF, reboot, create the partition again, reboot, install dos. the reboots are required.

If the translation has failed the boot sector won't be at expected address.
I have tried a lot in these cases, and the only consistency is in putting user CHS values in XUB and turning off the autotranslation. Else it depends on both card size and addressing method used to create MBR of it.

So that was strange. I went back to run autoconfigure on a clean prebuilt binary and it did not detect any controllers. I went and connected a mechanical HDD, ran it again and now it detects a controller. Then I went in entered my CHS values for the 512MB CF Card. I saved this, then concatenated it x4 to make it fill my EEPROM (unsure if necessary but did it anyway), told it to fill in any gaps at the end with zeros then I burned it to the EEPROM chip. Installed chip and the computer still is looking to the stock BIOS first for some reason. I run setup, access the stock BIOS, then exit and XUB loads. It detects my CF card as slave again but now I get the missing operating system error. I use a DOS 6.22 boot disk, FDISK and create a DOS partition then I do fdisk /MBR after. Then I format C: /s. Then I install DOS 6.22 from floppies. I reboot and it boots into DOS off the CF card. Mission accomplished kind of.

It does take a good 30 seconds for it to detect the master/slave configuration which I thought should happen more quickly. Maybe it has something to do with where it still identifies the CF adapter as slave. The other thing that still bothers me is how the system is still looking to the stock BIOS first and doesn't go directly into the XUB. Would it help if I went into the 3com utility and changed the address of the option ROM to the lowest setting? I...probably am not using the best words there. Hopefully you know what I mean.

...3com utility?

What is the exact hardware you're running XUB on, it isn't xt-cf-lite or something like that?

zb10948 wrote on 2024-03-12, 19:48:

...3com utility?

What is the exact hardware you're running XUB on, it isn't xt-cf-lite or something like that?

Sorry I should have said that in my original post. I'm not using an XTCF Lite for this machine. I have a 3com 3C509 NIC. It had a socket for an option ROM.

I put a jumper on the CF adapter to see what would happen. Normally that would make the drive appear as slave but where my drive was already being detected as slave... for some reason the jumper now made it master. This fixed both problems. Thanks for everyone's help!