IDE drives don't use landing zones of write precomp. For landing zone use 989, for write precomp you want NONE--some BIOSes call it 65535

jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-06-27, 00:44:

IDE drives don't use landing zones of write precomp. For landing zone use 989, for write precomp you want NONE--some BIOSes call it 65535

I've tried setting LZ=CYL and Precomp only ranges 0-9999. Some of the hard drive pre-sets show a NONE in the value, but I can't put letters in the box. Putting 9999 in automatically turns it to NONE (as I just found out), but it didn't work still. Nice to see NONE in there now, though.

I see. Only other idea is master/slave jumper on the drive isn't set correctly, or something wrong with the ribbon cable

Knew this was going to be a bit tricky. I believe I've tried other cables, but I'm determined, so I'm trying a known good now. Damn. still no-go. I don't have drives old enough for this to try another.

There is an "XT-IDE BIOS on a floppy" thread elsewhere on here. If you disable the drive in your BIOS and try booting from that, it could rule out a BIOS coding quirk

Sweet. Got something different happening. Also getting symptoms of memory issues now (especally after trying to load XUBDisk). After a few attempts, it is able to find the drive, but then locks up on the last step. I reboot (via reset switch or Power) and now my 7168k Extended memory is GONE all 0. Won't do shit then. I kill the thing completely and restart and it comes back, passes mem check and continues to have the same issue. Boots ANY floppy OS and even loads Windows 3.11 off a ZIP.

The CPU is pretty nice.

Updates:
Alrighty! I've gotten somewhere! The XTIDE bootable BIOS is what made the thing boot, for now. I'll kinda go down the path I was going...
I had a feeling a memory module was bad, so I pulled the memory that didn't look OE and tried booting it. The remaining 4 modules add up to 3072K, which seems odd for an even number of sticks... All eight of them was 7108K

With the memory removed, it moved through POST with much swiftness and the XTIDE BIOS didn't get stuck irregularly anymore. Still no HDD, it detects WDC-2420, but locks up trying to boot A. Here's where the "d'oh" begins...
I pulled the drive and hung it from my LX, to install DOS, so I can try booting it directly. I was not expecting what happened next... The computer could NOT detect the drive!! What?! I literally was using it a few days ago and copied 50-60MB of data onto it. I have NOTHING else to try in this thing (or DO I?) Indeed. I grabbed a Quantum Fireball 2.1AT from another system and jabbed it in there. It ran through POST and XTIDE very quickly, booted to Windows 98. Wow. Can't use that drive though, so I grabbed this: ST31001A

I started the 6.22 install process and it had NO issues rebooting and doing it over and over. Lo-and behold, booted DOS from a 10 GB hard drive... Wow. A 486 with 10GB would've cost upwards of $20k, I want to guess. Interesting that a 10GB drive even works with it AT ALL!

So what I learned: Test the HDD again, in ANOTHER system, if all symptoms seem to be HDD related.

I have THIS thing too:

I tried using it with some interesting results. I'm not even sure what EXACTLY it is, but it looks like what I needed, so I gave it a whirl. When it is plugged in, it takes over being controlled by the system BIOS, except, disabling on-board HDC and FDC does nothing but what it says. The computer fully acknowledged the setting of the two floppy drives and booted from A like it was nothing. Same with the XTIDE: Ran the gambit, detected the drive, then attempted boot. With the good drive in now, I tested again and it successfully boots from this card using the XTIDE BIOS.

There are some issues still , but I guess I can't continue testing until I get a HDD with 9999 or less Cylinders.

If you're happy using XT-IDE, you just need to add an Ethernet card with the XT-IDE BIOS chip on it as a boot rom, that way you can dispense with the boot floppy