You've got yourself a fancied up 386 there my friend, not a 486. That chip has some 486 features but isn't the real deal - still a cool machine for early 90's games though! Have you tried all combinations with the fdd cable? Remember that you can flip the end that plugs into the ide controller as well. I must have installed a thousand floppy drives in my life and I don't remember ever getting one right the first go.

And definately have a look at the bios settings and make sure the machine is looking for the right sort of drive. It's usually the delete key to get into the bios.

Good luck!

bah that seller totally ripped me off! Good thing it was free then though. 😀 I'll try switching that one as well, haven't tried that for some reason. Is it possible for an old motherboard such as this one that it doesn't have a BIOS setup utility? There's no mention of a 'press >key< to enter BIOS' during POST. thanks for the reply!

I believe the 386DX-33 I had back in the day had a BIOS setup, so yeah they were doing them around that time.

I do remember some machines having a setting for an alternate (Japanese?) type of floppy drive. You also didn't mention whether it's a 5.25" or 3.5" drive, or high/double/low density, and the controller probably cares about that.

If you have a cable that can connect to 2 FDDs, you might also try switching which connector you're using for the problem drive.

If all else take a picture of the back of the drive and the cable connector then post it here. There should be plenty of people ready to help you.

Thanks for the replies, embarrassingly it turns out that the end of the cable that goes in the controller card was upside down 🙄 . Delete key activates the BIOS setup. Sadly I couldn't find a model number for the mainboard in there. The processor is a 486 DLC-40. Once I find my camera I'll upload some pics of it! Thanks again for the help so far!

Well it took some time but I finally took some pics of the mainboard. Any help Id'ing this would be grand 😀
UPDATE: I finally found the board thanks to this link: http://leoandfanny.bplaced.net/vintagecompute … MXIC/index.html
-> it's a copy of this board: http://leoandfanny.bplaced.net/vintagecompute … MXIC/PT-321.htm
I found schematics for the ISA controller card here: http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy- … AT-inte-63.html. Before I go ahead and try, is there any reason this card would not support CDROM drives?
Lastly, given my limited ISA gfx & soundcard collection, does anyone have any recommendations for this system? I have the following two gfx cards:
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … logic-cl-gd5420
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … ital-wd90c30-lr
for soundcards I have these three:
a FSSC-CS2.1 3D sound with a crystal CX4237B-XQ3 chip
a media magic card with an Analog Devices AD1846JP soundport chip
and lastly an ESS Audiodrive ES1868F

Was this an ebay find? I vaguely remember one of those 386/486 systems coming up for sale recently.

No it's from a local (belgian) second hand auction site and he wasn't asking any money for it so I don't think it was on ebay as well.

A few rules of thumb i use to get my FDD to work on the first try.

These are common knowledge but maybe might help.

-the middle connector in the floppy cable is for 5.25 drives
-The extremity connector with the crossover goes on the 3.5 drives
-On the controller board you have have pin 1 and 2 of the connector written on the PCB, the red wire of the floppy cable goes on this side.
- When there is a pin missing in the middle of the connector on the floppy drive, the notched side of the floppy cable goes opposite of the missing pin.

When it still does not work i try to reseat the ISA controller and usually try changing slot.

This being said I have a 486 board that will not detect any hard drive no matter what hard drive and what isa controller or cable i use, the FDD works though. I think my board is simply defective, it suffered some serious battery leaking damage...

Good luck

Thanks for the advise, the floppy is working now though. Badmofo was right in suggesting that the end at the IDE controller could be reversed. 😀 I'm now about to add a CD-ROM drive (taking it to the next level 😏 ) but since there's no mention of CDrom devices on the configuration page of the ISA controller card I was wondering if it is even supported/possible?
edit: that's right, I noticed I have a barrel type CMOS battery on this board. Should I be worried? It looks fine, though I remember reading those batteries were prone to leaking?

Does it hold the BIOS values, time/date etc? If it doesn't, you'd better remove it.

The Ti486DLC is a Cyrix 486DLC clone. It's basically a pimped up 386 with 1KB L1 cache and the 486 instruction set. Running at 40mhz the speed is quite nice and competes with entry level 486 CPU's up to the DX-33, depending on the game/software used. If you pair it with a decent ISA graphics card (e.g. a Tsengs Labs ET4000) it's a nice and fast machine for the classic DOS games.

FGB wrote:

The Ti486DLC is a Cyrix 486DLC clone. It's basically a pimped up 386 with 1KB L1 cache and the 486 instruction set. Running at 40mhz the speed is quite nice and competes with entry level 486 CPU's up to the DX-33, depending on the game/software used. If you pair it with a decent ISA graphics card (e.g. a Tsengs Labs ET4000) it's a nice and fast machine for the classic DOS games.

That's wrong, actually. The TI version has 8kb cache.

sliderider wrote:

That's wrong, actually. The TI version has 8kb cache.

Nope. Your statement is wrong.

I have the Ti486DLC CPU myself:

http://www.amoretro.de/2012/03/386-486-mainbo … 4c87dlc-33.html

The DLC's have 1KB L1 cache. Maybe you mixed it up with Ti's later "SXL" which had 8KB cache as well as the original 486 CPU's of the 486 platform.

FGB wrote:

Nope. Your statement is wrong. […]
Show full quote

sliderider wrote:

That's wrong, actually. The TI version has 8kb cache.

Nope. Your statement is wrong.

I have the Ti486DLC CPU myself:

http://www.amoretro.de/2012/03/386-486-mainbo … 4c87dlc-33.html

The DLC's have 1KB L1 cache. Maybe you mixed it up with Ti's later "SXL" which had 8KB cache as well as the original 486 CPU's of the 486 platform.

Read please and tell me how much cache this page says it has. I also have several TI 486DLC's.

http://www.cpu-museum.de/?m=Texas+Instruments&f=486DLC

The site you linked has incorrect information.

It holds the BIOS values fine so far.
The Red Hill cpu guide also lists the DLC40 as having 1k L1 cache (http://redhill.net.au/c/c-4.html)
edit: though it's a cyrix DLC40 that's on that page and not a TI one I see now

sliderider wrote:

Read please and tell me how much cache this page says it has. I also have several TI 486DLC's.

http://www.cpu-museum.de/?m=Texas+Instruments&f=486DLC

The site you linked has incorrect information.

No, sliderider, the 1993 Ti is a 1:1 Cyrix clone with 1KB of cache. Period. I have this from first hand experience. And 99% of the websites list it with 1KB as well.

We should better concentrate on helping the thread opener because he has a really nice setup there.

TI started out making exact copies of the Cyrix 486DLC (TI 486DLC), but later they started producing an 8kb version (TI 486SXL). This annoyed Cyrix, which lead to the termination of their contract.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

TI started out making exact copies of the Cyrix 486DLC (TI 486DLC), but later they started producing an 8kb version (TI 486SXL). This annoyed Cyrix, which lead to the termination of their contract.

Yep, that is exactly what happened back in the day and I'm happy someone remembers this correctly, although the contract termination didn't last long or just applied to the DLC, I don't know the details.

This is btw. what I wrote earlier:

FGB wrote:

The DLC's have 1KB L1 cache. Maybe you mixed it up with Ti's later "SXL" which had 8KB cache as well as the original 486 CPU's of the 486 platform.