Does it boot from HD if the floppy is intalled but disabled in BIOS?

You should try to find another BIOS or install XT-IDE, will do exactly what you need 😉

Yep, XT-IDE will do exactly what you need, as well as give support for any sized IDE hard drive you want.

Install it on a ROM on an Ethernet card and make sure it's boot rom is enabled. It can be configured to boot from hard drive, and you can manually override to the A-Drive as it boots. It completely replaces the BIOS hard drive routines as well as the BIOS bootup routine.

But very weird for it not to try the hard drive after failing on the floppy.

dionb wrote:

Taking bits & pieces of my big haul from a few weeks back I'm building some nice systems. One is a 386DX-25 built around an Atla […]
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Taking bits & pieces of my big haul from a few weeks back I'm building some nice systems. One is a 386DX-25 built around an Atlantic Computer Products SER-386C board. Mid 1991 relatively high-end beast, with socketed i386DX-25, 4MB SIPP RAM, and a Chips & Technologies P82C30x chipset. After removing the inevitably leaking battery, cleaning up the residue and mounting an external 3x AAA NiMH battery pack it's working perfectly with one irritating exception:

I can't choose boot order, and as soon as I install a floppy drive, it tries to boot from that and doesn't try HDD if that fails. As I want to have at least one floppy installed and still boot from HDD by default, this is a bit of a pain...

BIOS is an AMIBIOS, but unlike any I've seen before, with a regular CMOS and an "XCMOS" for advanced C&T 386 chipset registers. The actual options are pretty straightforward even if presented in an unusual way, but one thing I can't find is anything resembling boot order.

I'm using a pretty generic ISA IDE & Floppy controller with no identifiable name and a Goldstar GM82C765B controller chip without jumpers or headers for anything except HDD LED.

Anyone have any ideas how to convice it to keep booting from HDD even if FDD is present?

I had the exact same type of BIOS back in the days and no, there is no way to change the boot order. It will always look for A: first. This was quite normal back in times for machines older than 1992-1991.

This aside, normal procedure for that kind of machines is first to look for a boot floppy in drive A: and then it does one of these things:

- If there is a bootable floppy in drive A:, start booting from it.
- If there is a non bootable floppy in drive A:, give a "non system disk" error and wait. At that point you need to remove the floppy from the drive and continue (by pressing any key or rebooting, it depends on the machine IIRC). Again, this is quite normal.
- If there is no floppy in drive A:, continue to boot from fixed disk.

Anything happens instead of these options means that something is wrong/abnormal. You need to check your related hardware, check if your HDD is really bootable, etc. Especially check if the BIOS parameters of HDD is correct.

Be aware of the fact that, that kind of BIOS will never accept HDDs larger than 528MB under normal conditions (i.e. without using an overlay software like Ontrack -or its brand specific versions- or setting up the large HDD properly using something like Seatools, etc.). I actually think that your problem is probably this, and after checking floppy, it stuck there since it can't really recognize your HDD.

As one other member already indicated, XT-IDE BIOS-on-a-NIC is also a very suitable solution for that kind of problems.

Some BIOS that could work in your board here:
80386 BIOS image collection

tayyare wrote:

I had the exact same type of BIOS back in the days and no, there is no way to change the boot order. It will always look for A: […]
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I had the exact same type of BIOS back in the days and no, there is no way to change the boot order. It will always look for A: first. This was quite normal back in times for machines older than 1992-1991.

This aside, normal procedure for that kind of machines is first to look for a boot floppy in drive A: and then it does one of these things:

- If there is a bootable floppy in drive A:, start booting from it.
- If there is a non bootable floppy in drive A:, give a "non system disk" error and wait. At that point you need to remove the floppy from the drive and continue (by pressing any key or rebooting, it depends on the machine IIRC). Again, this is quite normal.
- If there is no floppy in drive A:, continue to boot from fixed disk.

Anything happens instead of these options means that something is wrong/abnormal. You need to check your related hardware, check if your HDD is really bootable, etc. Especially check if the BIOS parameters of HDD is correct.

That was the trick!

I was using a Gotek FDD emulator, which gives either a bootable disk (works, but not what I wanted) or an empty, non-bootable disk, which gives the 'non-system disk' error I couldn't get around. I replaced the Gotek with a real FDD and it happily booted through to HDD with it there so long as there was no disk in it.

You live and learn 😀

Be aware of the fact that, that kind of BIOS will never accept HDDs larger than 528MB under normal conditions (i.e. without using an overlay software like Ontrack -or its brand specific versions- or setting up the large HDD properly using something like Seatools, etc.). I actually think that your problem is probably this, and after checking floppy, it stuck there since it can't really recognize your HDD.

Not likely:
- the drive I'm testing with is a Maxtor/Miniscribe 8051A 51MB physical/41MB usable HDD, 981 cylinders, 5 heads, 17 sectors. Well below 500MB
- it boots fine with no FDD drive installed

Fully aware of the 528MB limits, also confirmed them with a 1.6GB drive. Now looking for a 340-420MB HDD I know is lying around here *somewhere* to complete this system.

As one other member already indicated, XT-IDE BIOS-on-a-NIC is also a very suitable solution for that kind of problems.

Definitely one to try when my EEPROM flasher arrives (post here has been awful in December, still waiting for stuff ordered locally in November to get here).