First post, by appiah4
- Rank
- l33t++
Well, this is starting to become a fairly bothersome issue, so much so that I may forego building the 486 I am working on and settle for a Socket 5 Pentium instead.. But before I do that, maybe Vogons can help me out.
I am building this PC and I'm having trouble with IDE/Floppy drives every step of the way. Let me start out by listing the parts in the system giving me trouble:
UMC MB457 MB w/ OB U5SX 486-33F
16MB EDO RAM (4Mx32 with single side HM5117405S6 chips)
Goldstar 48x IDE CD-ROM
Expansion cards are:
ISA1: Acer M5105 I/O Control Card
ISA3: Trident TVGA900B 512K VGA
ISA5: Edison Gold-16 ES688FC Sound Card
The I/O card is configured with FDD enabled, IDE primary, COM1 and COM2 enabled, LPT configured as LPT1 as per thisjumper configuration diagram. Devices on the Primary IDE of this card are detected on IRQ14, at least the CD-ROM is, when MSCDEX is loaded.
The sound card is hard configured to A220/I7/D1, and the IDE controller on it is enabled as Secondary on IRQ15.
And here's the issue: IDE and Floppy is giving me all kinds of headache.
I first installed a Mitsumi Floppy Drive and a backplate Compact Flash adapter, and connected them to the I/O card's IDE header with the CF adapter as master and CD-ROM as slave, configured by jumpers. I have tried two diffretent compact flash cards, one is a no-name 256MB from China and the other is a 2GB Sandisk. The BIOS (which is a 1995 AMI BIOS with the WinBIOS interface) and LBA support, which auto-detected the compact flash cards in both cases no problem. The PC booted up, but refused to boot to the FAT16 partitions on either card, which I had prepared in a virtualmachine guest on a Win7 host PC. I said OK, that's strange, let me try to set them up on this PC because you know, old controllers can not read Hard Drives prepared by other controllers sometimes, so I went ahead and tried to boot the PC with a Windows 98 SE boot disk I had around.
The PC booted off the disk, but also spat out a couple of complaints about unknown command lines in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. Strange, so I did a type CONFIG.SYS and type AUTOEXEC.BAT and both returned as a couple lines of garbage ASCII text. Now, at this point I would say the floppy drive is messed up, but the garbage ASCII text is consistent whenever I do a type, and it always boots up fine! So I said, ok, let's try to partition the hard drives anyhow, I launched fdisk and it hard locked up. For both CF Cards.
At this point I pull out both the CF adapter and the floppy and I install a WD Caviar 1.2GB HDD and a GOTEK Floppy Emulator. I launch an MSDOS 6.22 boot disk image, and it boots fine. It reads everything on the disk. FDISK runs fine. All is well. Except now the HDD I installed is making lots of weird clicking noises, and I remember I forgot to auto-detect it in BIOS, so I do that, and it gets detected fine and the clicking kind of goes away but not quite. I boot the DOS 6.22 Boot Disk and it even runs MSCDEX and configures the CD-ROM which is installed as a slave on the IDE chain. I am ecstatic, so I put a CD in there, and type R:
CDR101:Not ready reading drive E Abort, Retry, Fail? (I hit f) Fail on INT 24
I boot MSDOS 6.22 images, repartition the hard drive, format it and install MS-DOS 6.22. It installs fine, although there are strange hiccups - while partitioning, FDISK disk validation progress erratically resets to zero at times. Regardless, DOS boots from C: and I think to myself, phew, so I guess it was the CF adapter all along. But I decide I would do a scandisk on the HDD as I haven't used it in ages, so I run SCANDISK.
Disk Read Error
That's when I said FUCK IT and shut it off.
Granted, I missed a step here, I did not run the GOTEK alongside the CF Adapter, so I don't know if that combination would work or not, but something's wrong. Either the I/O card is dead, or both the floppy and the HDD are dead, and possibly the CF adapter is incompatible. The system runs fine with just the GOTEK on the FDD connector.
I will try it with the CF cards tonight, then with a Seagate 8.4GB drive that I know for sure is fine (but good luck getting it detected with such an ancient BIOS). I used the IDE cable I currently use with another build and had no issues, but I'll also try another IDE cable, just in case. I will also try moving the CD-ROM out of the IDE chain and onto the sound card. For all I know, the floppy, HDD and CD-ROM could all indeed be dead, or the I/O card is to blame (but the COM port is fine and FDD works fine with a GOTEK) or I messed something else up in the system build but I can't find it. I'm open to all suggestions.
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