First post, by elsdrag00n
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello everyone! I've been trying to build a 486 out of some parts that should work, but I've got this persistent problem with the HDDs not holding formatting. It's reliably unreliable, and consistently inconsistent. A friend sent me here for help, since I'm at the end of my rope. I'll get right into the details:
Overview:
I purchased a used 486 dx 66 system from a pc recycler. Inside, it came complete except for the HDD. I've removed the Varta barrel and replaced with a coin cel, and to narrow things down in testing I've removed the sound card and a scsi card. This is the mainboard https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/mitac-trigon-ih4077c
Problem:
I can not for the life of me get a HDD to stick properly so that I can install programs. The BIOS does not correctly auto-detect the IDE settings of the drives I install; it also does not consistently get the same wrong answer when it tries. I can manually set them up, but then I generally get issues while using FDISK to set up the drive. If I can get past FDISK, Formatting is hit or miss. If I get past formatting, files tend to get corrupted. If I reset the PC, the entire thing usually gets set back to square 1.
If you leave the Virus Warning feature on in the BIOS, it will frequently trigger boot sector warnings while you use the PC.
Things I've tried:
I have two different IDE drives, two different I/O boards, and two different sets of ribbon cables to choose from. There are jumpers on the HDD drives and on one of the io boards. When the jumpers are set as they should be, none of it effects the issues I'm seeing, leading me to believe the problem lies elsewhere.
I'm unable to flash my BIOS as it's an EPROM. Regardless, I seem to have the latest version, though there's no way to know it's intact.
The machine runs perfectly fine off of the A drive. The HDD is the only area that seems to have issues.
Scandisk does not reveal bad sectors when I scan drives, but does complain about FAT.
When you do manage to get the HDD set up temporarily (manually enter IDE settings in bios, get lucky with FDISK, Format goes ok), files copied to the drive will get corrupted. The filenames themselves are scrambled, like COMMAND.COM will turn into CMNLOAD.CNM or something. It's not always exactly the same. Even the Volume name of the HDD will have it's letters scrambled slightly.
Only one time, I think when the BIOS seemed to actually guess the IDE parameters correctly, was I able to install and copy programs to the HDD and run them. Played some Prince of Persia. And then after a reset, it was all gone.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills trying to get this thing to work. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!