Pick a drive that is known to work (e.g. by testing in a different system first), set it to master, connect it to the primary channel with no other devices present at all, and boot from the Win98 boot disk. If that works, try the same with the second channel. If it works on primary but not on secondary, check if the secondary channel is enabled and has the correct address / irq set. If it works on both, it conflicts with your other devices (CF cards don't play well in master/slave mode, nor do older hard disks).

I noticed you have an 82C929 sound card with IDE interface.
You might want to try disabling the sound card IDE channel - I had to cut a trace and remove chips to get my 82C924 to stop hogging the secondary IDE port! If your '929 has a jumper to enable or disable its onboard IDE channel, hopefully you won't have to resort to anything so drastic as cutting traces 😜

Thank you both for replying.
I've had a couple of hours now to play around with it and I do manage to get the CD-rom detected when it is on the primary IDE channel now. I just can't use two HDD's and a CD-rom, it seems.
@Eep386 I have tried setting things up without the sound card plugged in. Just the controller and my Speedstar, but no luck. I can't seem to get the secondary IDE channel on the controller card to work. BIOS only sees C and D. It never even looks for more, but I was hoping that would not apply to the sound card, as it seems to start a program of sorts that activates its onboard IDE, but no luck there either. I've tried a bunch of different drivers now, and as far as I can tell the settings that the sound card goes for are solid (irq 15 and port 170 for the cdrom).

I was hoping to use a mechanical HDD for OS and a CF for games, and a CD-rom on the secondary channel, but it appears I might have to go full CF, which is a bit of a bummer. I love those HDD-sounds 😀

NevilClavain wrote:

Thank you both for replying.
I've had a couple of hours now to play around with it and I do manage to get the CD-rom detected when it is on the primary IDE channel now. I just can't use two HDD's and a CD-rom, it seems.
@Eep386 I have tried setting things up without the sound card plugged in. Just the controller and my Speedstar, but no luck. I can't seem to get the secondary IDE channel on the controller card to work. BIOS only sees C and D. It never even looks for more

It never ever looks for more because your system's BIOS only supports two IDE devices; it doesn't even know the second port is there. If you want to use to IDE ports for a total of four devices on your system, you need a controller with its own BIOS that supports four devices or a BIOS upgrade for the motherboard that supports two IDE ports..

, but I was hoping that would not apply to the sound card, as it seems to start a program of sorts that activates its onboard IDE, but no luck there either. I've tried a bunch of different drivers now, and as far as I can tell the settings that the sound card goes for are solid (irq 15 and port 170 for the cdrom).

If the sound card has its own IDE port (check that it is indeed an IDE port and not, say, Mitsumi's proprietary interface), connecting the CD-ROM drive to it and installing the proper drivers should normally work as it doesn't depend from the system BIOS. That was the way to add a CD drive to a PC back when PC's only supported a single IDE channel.

Your VLB card probably don't support CD-ROM IDE Drives, because nearly non of them did.
Also got a VLB I/O Controller, but had to disable the second port and use my SB16 IDE Port, because it didn't recognize my CD-ROM Drives.
Remember to install the correct CD IDE Driver from your SOUNDCARD and not a standard CD-ROM driver.

I will be buying an eprom programmer to upgrade the BIOS. I have things working now with HDD and CD-rom on the primary IDE channel, but the soundcards IDE and the secondary on the controller are completely ignored by the machine. I am also having problems with windows 3.11. The BIOS is from '93 and the newest I can find is from '97. Perhaps it helps upgrading. 😀

Just relied to your Windows post as well.
A lot of your problems will go away once you have a good working combination to build off.
As your finding out a lot of this old hardware is down to finding the right combination of parts. Quite often 2 bits of hardware simply didn't like each other.

I would do what I said in the other post, get the system stable with a basic setup. then add the "extras" bit by bit.
if you have the patience the members here will be able to help you get your 486 with HDD, CF and CD up and running!

Just a little update and a new question here that I hope someone will know the answer to.

I managed to get a bios chip and program it with a newer bios from the old FIC websites. Now the board accepts up to four IDE devices and has no problem detecting my CD-roms 😀

However, It wants me to type a password when I start the machine. There is no password, but it still asks for it and typing nothing and pressing enter does not make the requester go away. Going into BIOS and setting a password and then typing that when the requester pops up makes it go away and the machine boots fine.

In bios when I want to "set cmos password" it asks me for old password, lets say I set that to 486, after typing that it asks for new, and I just press enter It informs me that "password is disabled". It still reqests a password whn I start the machine (after ram is checked).
"Set power password" in bios asks for old password, but no matter what I type it never asks a followup question, and typing the password I typed in "set cmos password" in the requester when starting the machine will make it boot fine.

Interestingly a password from this page (589589) also work fine when booting, regardless of what the "cmos password" is set as, but it will NOT work when trying to "set power password".
https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000451.htm

Has anyone run into this before? Is there a fix?

EDIT: Also, I am suddenly having problems with EMM386. It informs me that "EMM386 NOT INSTALLED - UNABLE TO SET PAGE FRAME BASE ADDRESS". I have tried reading up on EMM386 but I'm not getting any wiser. Any parameter I throw at it in config.sys is being reported on boot as invalid.

I'm sorry to bump this, but I'm really hoping someone knows the answer to my final question. I know it's a bit of a deviation from the subject. I've had a while now to try to find a solution to this but I've had no luck. 589589 works fine as a password, but I would like to disable password completely.