If you're using a multi-I/O card, do you disable IDE on the card with correct jumper settings? If not, that could be your conflict...

Anyway, standalone floppy controllers exist, but are probably a lot older and might not support HD (or even 3.5"...) floppies. What I prefer to use in these situations (I have a VLB VGA card with IDE but no floppy on it...) is a SCSI card with floppy controller, like the Adaptec AHA-1542C. Added bonus: I get SCSI support 😉

I've never experienced this issue on any of my boards that lack an HDD/FDD controller, but I only have multi I/o cards. It seems the only thing left to do is try and find out what the jumper settings do... seems like it might be an IRQ conflict or some weird incompatibility. Have you tested these FDD cards on your other machines? You would probably need to disable the FDD controller in the bios, but it would be nice to know that they work. You might also want to try and disable the HDD controller via the bios and see if the FDD controller starts working.

You can try disabling the built-in HDD controller and any IO in BIOS. In that case there should be no conflicts and all three IO cards should work.

Once you have confirmation that your IO cards actually work you can start looking for jumper configuration. If you can't find any manuals then at least get pictures of jumper settings from Vogons members who have similar 486 rigs as you. You might get lucky and they might have the same IO card.

dionb wrote on 2022-04-25, 12:16:

If you're using a multi-I/O card, do you disable IDE on the card with correct jumper settings? If not, that could be your conflict...

Anyway, standalone floppy controllers exist, but are probably a lot older and might not support HD (or even 3.5"...) floppies. What I prefer to use in these situations (I have a VLB VGA card with IDE but no floppy on it...) is a SCSI card with floppy controller, like the Adaptec AHA-1542C. Added bonus: I get SCSI support 😉

FDD I haven't managed to make it work, at best I can get it to turn LED on as if it seeks and ends up with "Error 2h!" after some time which I think is general read error. Which is kinda funny because it's gotek drive, so it's definitely not disk issue. Same thing with gotek drive itself, works fine in other computer, with same disk images and same USB stick.

Aa for HDD I tried it both ways, so far I can only boot from CF/HDD with IDE on motherboard disabled and IDE on card enabled. In this case XTIDE picks everything up and boots fine. Maybe that's how it should be, XTIDE is meant for ISA controllers and these integrated are probably connected to PCI bus so XTIDE isn't aware of them.

bstar wrote on 2022-04-25, 13:04:

I've never experienced this issue on any of my boards that lack an HDD/FDD controller, but I only have multi I/o cards. It seems the only thing left to do is try and find out what the jumper settings do... seems like it might be an IRQ conflict or some weird incompatibility. Have you tested these FDD cards on your other machines? You would probably need to disable the FDD controller in the bios, but it would be nice to know that they work. You might also want to try and disable the HDD controller via the bios and see if the FDD controller starts working.

These I/O cards work fine as both IDE and FDD controllers on my other board which doesn't have anything integrated. As mentioned above, maybe XTIDE can't drive integrated IDE ports because they're connected to IDE ports and not ISA port as the one on I/O card, which works and boots fine with XTIDE.

For these experiments I'm using 512 MB CF card, doesn't work on "clean" motherboard IDE ports, works fine and boots when connected to I/O card IDE port + XTIDE.

All of these cards work fine on other 486 motherboard I have. With same jumper configs,same gotek drive and FDD cable. I would probably use that one and not this one if it supported 3.3V CPUs that I want to use. Motherboard only has IDE ports, it doesn't have FDD port so it doesn't have anything related to floppy in BIOS, only type selection (360kB , 720kB ...)

AlexZ wrote on 2022-04-25, 15:47:

You can try disabling the built-in HDD controller and any IO in BIOS. In that case there should be no conflicts and all three IO cards should work.

Once you have confirmation that your IO cards actually work you can start looking for jumper configuration. If you can't find any manuals then at least get pictures of jumper settings from Vogons members who have similar 486 rigs as you. You might get lucky and they might have the same IO card.

Cards work fine on another (ISA/VLB) motherboard, both IDE and FDD. I can get IDE on them to work fine, only FDD doesn't work. If it was port on motherboard I would assume something was damaged. But strange this is all three cards, three different chipsets, same problem... FDD doesn't work with or without XTIDE.

Jumper configs aren't an issue, they have silkscreen info about what position means what. They're all configured to default settings address wise. I tried meddling with it but it didn't change anything (for better at least 😅).

It seems that this board is damaged. I don't know what else to conclude.

I haven't managed to get on board IDE controller to work no matter what. I tried 512 MB CF card, which should be within capabilities, and even 425 MB WD HDD from 1994, both are not recognized when connected to either of on board IDE ports. But if I connect one of these I/O cards, and use IDE port on it, they get recongnized and it boots from them. Even without XTIDE.

Board has two jumpers that relate to IDE controllers, one is enable/disable and the other is for addressing, fixed or relocatable. I tried all combinations, no change in behaviour whatsoever. Floppy doesn't work, although board doesn't have integrated FDD...

I would think that maybe BIOS is wrong for this motherboard, my has EPROM chip with silver sticker over UV window with "void" letters remaining on chip if you try to remove it, like warranty sticker. And on images online chip has "Phoenix Bios" sticker with serial number. But BIOS screen doesn't have anything extra or missing when compared to BIOS screens in manual.
I don't know what to think or do at this point 😒.

Seems like you've done everything right. If you can flash the bios (and can find the correct one), I would definitely give that a try. I assume you would be getting a CRC error at boot if the current bios is corrupted, so it's in the realm of possibility that the wrong bios was previously flashed.

Or maybe the BIOS isn't original and that's why it doesn't work.

You did make some progress - IO cards are obviously functional even in the bad board since you are able to use IDE port on them, just not the floppy port.

bstar wrote on 2022-04-27, 13:03:

Seems like you've done everything right. If you can flash the bios (and can find the correct one), I would definitely give that a try. I assume you would be getting a CRC error at boot if the current bios is corrupted, so it's in the realm of possibility that the wrong bios was previously flashed.

Board came with BIOS v2.1, on ultimate retro there's version 2.3, but with flasher tool. Problem is that this board has EPROM chip, not EEPROM so it can't be flashed via motherboard. I have (E)EPROM chips, although not exact capacity as the one on the board is, 128 kB (27Co1o), I have EEPROM of 256 kB (27c020) so I doubled the size and burned that on flasher device but board doesn't boot with it. Unfortunately it's not chips fault because when I flashed BIOS I read from original chip it worked like original EPROM 😒.
I guess there was newer revision that came with EEPROM instead EPROM, my board is v2.0...

I even tried hotswapping original EPROM with blank one and try flashing but it didn't work. It errored out on flash chip detection.

I think Necroware on youtube stumbled on similar issue. Motherboard that kinda worked, but not fully, it turned out somebody plugged or flashed wrong bios.

AlexZ wrote on 2022-04-27, 16:08:

Or maybe the BIOS isn't original and that's why it doesn't work.

You did make some progress - IO cards are obviously functional even in the bad board since you are able to use IDE port on them, just not the floppy port.

I just tried them on one older ISA/VLB motherboard, Abit AB-PW4, this one doesn't have any integrated I/O and all three worked without any problems, both HDD and FDD connected on it 😒.

I think I'll shelve this board for now, at least until I can find BIOS from some other source and test it...