VOGONS


First post, by Prez

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Hi everyone !

I could get my hands on a very nice Tandy 1000RL, i already love this machine and its working great on floppy disks, but this one came with no hard disks installed. It is equipped with a very old XT-IDE controller, only able to manage XT-IDE hard drives, which are very uncommon. Still, i could get a Seagate ST351A/X which is the higher capacity you could get, 40 MB. Of couse, i could use an ISA card with another XT-IDE controller, but i need my ISA port for others cards, like this guy has a marvellous configuration and i want to do things like him : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zocVXdvHZkA

But i cannot achieve to make the hard disk recognised by the T1000 RL. Nor a Compact Flash reader with a 32 MB CF works, everthing stalls. When i launch FDISK from MSDOS 3.3 for Tandy 1000RL, it only says it sees no fixed hard disks. I read somewhere that you must initialize a new hard disk using HDINSTALL Deskmate utilities, but i simply cannot find this utility somewhere on internet ! Maybe there is another way to make the hard disk recognisable ?

Thanks for you help !

Best regards,
Philippe Dubois.

Old computers and videogames freak
President of french association https://mo5.com
Get better, get old ! 😁

Reply 1 of 5, by wierd_w

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The 8bit slots in the Tandy are basically to blame.

IDE really wants to be used in a 16bit mode, which is simply not (directly) possible on an 8bit card.
That said, I'd personally be looking into getting an XT-IDE card (modern) with XT-IDE bios on it.

This allows the use of more modern IDE devices, albeit in an unusual way. (The controller bios does 8bit multiplexing to talk to the 16bit interface over an 8bit one, as I understand it.)
This is different from the creatures back in the days of yore, like the Seagate controllers from back then, which have a different bus protocol.

These lotech cards for example:
https://texelec.com/product/isa-compactflash- … ighlight=XT-IDE
https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/

This video may be helpful to understand how these are different beasts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rgaJqYOPSg&t=19s

Reply 2 of 5, by Prez

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Oh, i accidentally made the Seagate recognisable ! There is a non DOS partition on it, that i need to get rid, and for that i need to boot on MSDOS 5 or 6. Cheers !

Old computers and videogames freak
President of french association https://mo5.com
Get better, get old ! 😁

Reply 3 of 5, by Prez

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wierd_w wrote on 2026-01-21, 12:38:
The 8bit slots in the Tandy are basically to blame. […]
Show full quote

The 8bit slots in the Tandy are basically to blame.

IDE really wants to be used in a 16bit mode, which is simply not (directly) possible on an 8bit card.
That said, I'd personally be looking into getting an XT-IDE card (modern) with XT-IDE bios on it.

This allows the use of more modern IDE devices, albeit in an unusual way. (The controller bios does 8bit multiplexing to talk to the 16bit interface over an 8bit one, as I understand it.)
This is different from the creatures back in the days of yore, like the Seagate controllers from back then, which have a different bus protocol.

These lotech cards for example:
https://texelec.com/product/isa-compactflash- … ighlight=XT-IDE
https://texelec.com/product/lo-tech-xt-cf-lite-rev-2/

This video may be helpful to understand how these are different beasts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rgaJqYOPSg&t=19s

Yup i know, it was a dead end. I will try to fit some ISA cards inside, maybe 2 or 3 if i'm lucky and provide an adapter, if so i will definitively use an xtended XT IDE card !
Best.

Old computers and videogames freak
President of french association https://mo5.com
Get better, get old ! 😁

Reply 4 of 5, by Prez

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Prez wrote on 2026-01-21, 12:48:

Oh, i accidentally made the Seagate recognisable ! There is a non DOS partition on it, that i need to get rid, and for that i need to boot on MSDOS 5 or 6. Cheers !

Its working now ! I have 40MB available, woot 😁

Old computers and videogames freak
President of french association https://mo5.com
Get better, get old ! 😁

Reply 5 of 5, by wierd_w

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dos 3.x has a 30mb disk size restriction.

Dos 6.22 has a 2gb disk size restriction.

Sounds like you hit the first one. Glad it's working for you.