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PC-XT: HD floppy and CF card on regular I/O card?

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First post, by Kubik

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Folks, I had an idea of combining some HD floppy ROM with XT-IDE BIOS, putting that into an EPROM socked on a LAN card, and have both HD floppy and CF card support on my XT board.

Well, it sort of works, but not really. I can see both ROMs executed, but they don't play together well. The system hangs when booting from either CF card or floppy.

I've tried latest XT-IDE BIOS configured for 16bit controller in 8bit mode, and I've tried two HD floppy ROMs - Sergey's, and Kouwell. I can confirm Sergey's ROM works when alone.

The question is - does someone use similar combination, and if yes, could you share your ROM with me?

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 1, by Kubik

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OK, so just if someone is interested. It turned out that most of my CF cards were formatted on 386 system using the native BIOS IDE support on the board - and that was somehow incompatible with the combination of XT-IDE and HD Floppy BIOS. I used Linux and dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc (or whatever the CF card was) to overwrite it with zeros, then using the same 386 with native floppy support and XT-IDE BIOS to partition and format the CF card, and then I was able to use the card together with HD floppy BIOS on XT.

I take it as the CF cards were partitioned using CHS and that confused XT-IDE BIOS to such extent it actually crashed 😀

BTW: I am using Kouwell HD floppy BIOS - it seems to autodetect the floppy type and doesn't bother with that F2 message on every boot like Sergey's HD floppy BIOS does.

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