First post, by dysamoria
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello everyone. A Tandy 1000 TL/2 was my family's first computer when I was a kid (age 12?). I have one now, again. It was a "recapturing my childhood" kinda purchase, about ten years ago. The one I have is NOT the original machine my family had when I was a kid. I bought a whole bunch of old classic computers for a project I never finished, but here I am working at it, and finally getting somewhere. The Tandy 1000 TL/2, though, is facing an odd problem:
I'm trying to get an XT-IDE CF-to-IDE card from Monotech to work in my Tandy 1000 TL/2. So far, the ROM is working (IDE_XTPL.BIN, though the original one it came with had the same results shown below). I used FDISK to partition the drive on the Tandy, installed DOS 5.0 from Tandy's distribution on 3.5" diskettes, but cannot run things from the drive or boot from it. Prior to doing fdisk /mbr, I had a freeze at booting from C or when trying to make a system disk with SYS from my C:\DOS folder. After doing FDISK /MBR, I get this weirdness every time I try to boot C:
🤪 Those lines move! They march along the screen, toward the left, 1 block per second. Nothing else happens at this point.
I tried booting to a known good CF card that is happily working in my Tandy 2500 XL/2, but the same weirdness happens.
Any ideas?
My first thought is that there's conflict between the CF/IDE controller and the graphics chip, but my reading so far on Tandy 1000 TL/2 specs shows they're not in the same I/O range (??). The system RAM is the factory standard 640K, but I have a batch of 64kx4 chips on the way from eBay. Don't know if this has any impact on anything.
The system came with an old XT hard drive, but I have that disconnected for now while I troubleshoot the CF-to-IDE issues. Disabling the onboard HD controller chip (via SETUPTL2 /A) did not affect anything, so I put it back on.
There are no other cards slotted.
Is it still necessary to pad the XT-IDE ROM, when the XT-IDE card has a bunch of address options? Only TWO of the available addresses I can use on the Monotech card will give me the boot ROM. D000 and D800. None of the others will work.