I recently acquired an old Magnavox MaxStation 286 from an estate sale. To my surprise and delight, this thing fired right up and the old HDD still works. I did replace the dreaded Dallas RTC chip.

I do have one major problem that has vexed me! The BIOS settings will not let me do two important things. I cannot enable booting from a floppy drive, and I also have no ability to input user-defined HDD parameters.

I have read through the manuals for this and similar models. The BIOS screens documented there display several additional pages of options I do not see. The docs also mention the use of a disk-based setup program for the BIOS that may have additional options. If anyone knows where to find that, if it exists, that would be helpful.

I’d appreciate some suggestions on what to do. I ideally want to use a modern CF or SD to IDE adapter. I could live with being limited to the stock HDD geometries in the BIOS, but not being able to boot from a floppy limits my ability to install anything on it.

Perhaps an XTIDE could be an option, and just work around the onboard BIOS? I’ve also thought about finding replacement BIOS ROMs. I don’t know much about that second option though.

Thanks in advance!