Anonymous Coward wrote:

I dumped the ROMs. I couldn't make much of them using an editor. I tried to merge the files to see if it would help, but it did not. I'm not even sure if the ROMs are corrupted or not. Anyway, you are free to try. DTK used chipsets from many different companies in their 286 motherboards. The images come from ST M27256 chips by the way.

Also, try different keyboard controllers with your Award BIOS if you have any spares. Maybe you could even borrow one from a 486 motherboard.

DTK 286F.rar

Those two ROMs are identical (same CRC), are you sure you didn't dump the same ROM twice? It does look like half of a legit BIOS though, either a high or a low.

And while you're here Anonymous Coward, do you remember this? -> http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showt … sion-for-PC-XTs I tried it and it works good, reads and writes HD disks fine. The only thing it's missing is the ability to boot from a HD disk, but otherwise it's just what I've been looking for 😁

Hmm...I'll try dumping them again. I don't know how I managed to dump the same ROM twice though...

I figured out what happened. I got them confused when I went to grab a file to clean the legs. I am not able to read the "low" ROM because there is an problem with the VCC pin according to my programmer software.

Using DRIVPARM or driver.sys in config.sys, it might be able to force the system to see the drive as its true capacity. It can apparently work even if there is no bios support for the drive type.

See:
http://www.computerhope.com/drivparm.htm
http://web.csulb.edu/~murdock/drivparm.html
http://webpages.charter.net/danrollins/techhelp/0279.HTM
and
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/60091

It can also be used to configure DOS to use nonstandard drives with floppy interfaces (flopticals, QIC-80 tape drives, 2.88MB drives, etc.)

GoblinUpTheRoad wrote:

I have a DTK 286 board here I'm trying to get running. The BIOS setup doesn't give a choice of floppy drives installed like most […]
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I have a DTK 286 board here I'm trying to get running. The BIOS setup doesn't give a choice of floppy drives installed like most other BIOSes i've used, but automatically detects them, though unfortunately not correctly.

The 3.5" 1.44Mb floppy drive is detected as a 5.25" 1.2Mb drive, it still works though but only with double density 720k disks, HD 1.44Mb disks usually hang the machine of gives a read error.

Has anyone ever encountered anything like this before?

DTKBios.jpg

Hello,

I have the same motherboard and It came with a newer bios version and it does support 1.44 disk drives. Please let me know if you still need a bios dump.

Olivier

Hmm. That BIOS is pretty old, cool! PC-DOS 3.30 from '87 was one of the first OSes on PC to support 1.44MB disks.
I don't think it's an hardware issue, though. Seems your board already has support for high-speed floppy controllers, because 1.2MB disks can be used.
I would simply use driver.sys or drivparm in DOS. That's how my XT was "updated" when I got it. 😀

http://www.easydos.com/drivparm.html
http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/driver.sys.htm