Malvineous wrote:Nothing wrong with that kind of old school - I recently bought a new small business PABX from China so all my old computers could dial up and call each other without needing a real phone line 😀
Awesome!
Malvineous wrote:I'm not sure why the Z100iDE wouldn't work with the RAID controller. Possibly it reports itself as a removeable device, which the controller doesn't support? That'd be odd though because hotswapping drives is kind of a big point of RAID controllers.
I concur. The only thing I haven't tried yet with the Z100IDEs is to figure out the proper CHS parameters and then try to have DOS work with one of the drives directly. If the stupid things really are "IDE", that *should* work. I highly suspect it will not work. 😉
Malvineous wrote:I presume you booted the machine with a ZIP disk present?
Of course -- I've tried it both ways.
Malvineous wrote:I imagine an empty drive would certainly not be supported. I take it none of your RAID cards have any options for any sort of pass-through IDE support? While not ideal sometimes this can work.
I've used many, many RAID controllers over the years, and I've never seen this fabled pass-through option. In my experience, they've all insisted on creating a degenerate(meaning only 1 drive) mirror or stripe.
Malvineous wrote:The RAID controllers I have used often write their metadata to some part of the disk. Linux software RAID writes it at the start of the device, IIRC the MegaRAID controllers write it on one of the last sectors of the drive so that it doesn't interfere with the partition table. Most of them write it somewhere on each disk so that a failed RAID controller can be swapped out with the replacement requiring no configuration.
Makes sense...but as I said before, when I've done similar things on actual server hardware, it's never been possible to transfer drives between systems and read the drives at all. CERTAINLY not transferring a drive that's part of a RAID array from one system and putting it in another as a non-RAID drive. That's just not how it works. So it's a pleasant surprise in the case of the TX2000. =)
Malvineous wrote:The "AT-IDE" you want is just a normal bog standard ISA IDE controller. On those machines of mine that lack IDE support (or use the wrong CHS translation) I put the XTIDE BIOS onto a flash chip and set it up as a boot ROM on the machine's network card. It adds full bootable IDE support just fine.
This is sort of self-contradictory. Pairing a standard ISA IDE host adapter with the XTIDE BIOS is not the same thing as just using a standard ISA IDE host adapter. 😉... but yes, that is what I ended up doing. Took me a while to get it all working correctly, but I have triumphed and I have no more drive woes on any of my vintage builds.
Malvineous wrote:That's a shame all yours have arrived broken though. What exactly was wrong with them? I only ask because in my own personal experience I have never come across a failed IDE controller.
So as it turns out, I only had one controller that was straight up *broken*. That card was simply DOA. It caused some confusion for a while but I did sort it all out. The other 2 ISA cards work perfectly, but they're fussy about drive cable lengths and what types of drives can be plugged into them. The key to figuring it all out was getting an old IBM spinning platter IDE drive that was within the size range recognizable by these early system BIOSes. Once I started from that reliable configuration point, I was able to branch out in my troubleshooting logic and determine what combinations worked. Some of the drives work with 40-wire cables; some don't. Some work with 80-wire cables; some don't. Some controllers are friendly with SSDs; some aren't.
The only cards that I haven't gotten to work at all yet are:
* Adaptec PCI cards -- UltraDMA/133. Might just be too new. The bus mastering might be done differently on these guys than how the 486 that I have with PCI slots is expecting. I've abandoned hope on these and I'm either going to return them to the seller or re-sell them. I'll have to verify if they work or not in my most modern system that had PCI slots, of course.
* BusLogic SCSI card -- I only wanted to use the floppy header on this originally, but now I want to use it as a SCSI host adapter. I think the terminators and/or lack of SCSI drives hooked up to the card is preventing anything on the card from working, which is unfortunate. I ended up getting a SCSI CD-ROM drive in the hopes that I could get it to work with that, and provide an easy(?) solution for getting a CD-ROM drive working in a system which doesn't have 2 IDE host adapters or whatever.
Malvineous wrote:All of the ones I have work, although of course those machines without BIOS support for IDE drives need the XT-IDE BIOS loaded in order to
see the drives.
See, I've had some weird results in this area. My 386 system just would not work with SSDs when plugged into an ISA IDE host adapter, unless the XT-IDE BIOS was employed. But I just got this slightly newer 486 system, and despite the fact that the CHS parameters in the CMOS are incorrect, my 30GB Kingston SSD boots and works perfectly! It's unreal how some of this stuff works.
Malvineous wrote:It would be extraordinarily unfortunate to get four failed IDE controllers!
Indeed. As I said, it turned out that I only had 1 failed one. The statistics just weren't matching reality, so I figured there was something else going on. I was mature about all this and waited until the very end of my troubleshooting to return anything to eBay sellers. I don't want to be one of those buyers that returns items because they can't get them to work, instead of them actually being DOA.
Malvineous wrote:Have you tried booting the machine with the controllers and then running diagnostic software to report any IDE devices found, just in case the problem is a lack of BIOS support?
I never did try this, because it never occurred to me that such diagnostic software would exist for DOS. I never saw such programs back in the day, so I wouldn't know what to look for. I did stumble across a nice diag program that PhilsComputerLab included in his DOS Benchmark suite. Was pretty useful!