Good evening and thanks for the screenshots! Seems fine to me. 😀

You like to try if changing the Head value to 15, LZone to 997 and see what happens.
Speaking of 286 systems, they generally are stable and work with about anything.

Except for old BIOSes, of courses. My Schneider Tower AT refues to work with DOMs or CF cards, for example.
Using XTIDE Universal BIOS fixed it for me, so it was no incomaptibility of the hardware.

However, there are a few compatibility issues that can be hardware related in older systems.
For example, combined FDC+IDE cards do handle the RDY(?) signal better.

With separate FDC/IDE controllers, there sometimes are issues.
Same goes for the floppy drives and HDDs.

Some of them expect some jumper settings or do use ATA commands (HDDs), data lines, etc.
the original IDE host controllers or the system's BIOS wasn't prepared for.

Thing is, the 286 generation isn't even IDE-aware most of the time.
It thinks it is communicating to a WD1003 compatible fixed disk controller,
as they where common in the days of ST506/ST412 MFM/RLL drives.

Sure, modern systems do use the same old WD1003 language,
but are aware of workarounds, or know how some IDE drives behave.

Best regards,
Jo22

Thanks for the quick reply. I do have a bunch of 8K EEPROMS and an ISA NIC lying around. Also I have in mind assembling a XT-CF Lite 4.1 card in the future. So maybe I will first ask a friend to write the XTIDE BIOS to one of the EEPROMS and I'll put it in the NIC. Any hints on what I have to mind when doing that? I think the I/O ports are hard coded in the binary, right? So I probably have to make sure to choose the right values for my Multi I/O card?

You're welcome.

Installing XTIDE BIOS on a NIC is easier than it looks, actually.
There are a few youtube videos around, showing possible ways to do it.

It's essentially like this.:
a) get XTIDE Universal BIOS
b) run the XT-IDE configuration program and save settings
c) write the binary to a blank EPROM chip
d) run the configuration program of your NIC and choose chip size and ROM location

As for b) I'm using the auto-detection,
since my EPROM can not store any additional settings once programmed.

Alternatively, you may also try dynamic disk overlays (DDOs).
They behave pretty much like boot sector virues in order to do their hacky magic.
Like intercepting int13h calls in order to report a drive geometry that's different
from what the BIOS reports, etc.

I'm not sure how well they work in 286 machines, though. 😅