Should work normally, unless the ISA bus runs at a clock rate higher than 8.33 MHz. But what do you mean with: "the BIOS does not see the controller"? The BIOS detects hard disks, not controllers. Also, with MFM you may get a "controller failure" message when the hard disk does not work - that's by design.

Have you tried booting from floppy and run debug to jump into the controller's BIOS?

Thanks for your thoughts. What I mean is, in the boot process, it gives "Hard Disk 0 Failure" message after trying for some 30 seconds. The drive and controller are both known good.

The ISA bus is set for 8.33MHz (1/3 CPU clock).

There are no controls in BIOS for boot order. I am trying to get it to boot from floppy; this HDD doesn't have a system on it yet. This controller has no ROM hence no BIOS.

After it throws the HDD failure message, it starts booting from floppy (the floppy controller is on the WD1003V) and that is slow as molasses. It does complete eventually (2 minutes).

I then run FDISK to see if it recognizes anything. It loads, screen blanks, then posts the message "error reading fixed disk" and quits.

SpeedStor loads, says "checking configuration"s, and just hangs there...

You're right, seems like the 1003V has no BIOS. I own the 1003-WA2, which has a BIOS.

Do you have any other cards inserted that may conflict with it? Thinking about the floppy controller.

Also, there should be a jumper block for the base address (W3 I think - open is 1F0-1F7h, closed is 170-177h).

Yeah, there are many flavors of WD1003x over the years.

I removed all cards except SVGA.

Only jumper on the 1003V is for "WD1003-WAH/WA2 compatible" or not. It is enabled by default. I tried it disabled, no difference.

Well it appears I am SOL. I tried another known-good 16-bit MFM controller and drive, with the same results.

It seems a bit odd or ironic to me that the BIOS has a complete AT drive type table, plus two user-defined entries, but doesn't support the controllers that most of the hard drives in the table were designed for.

I am now regretting scrapping a functional Epson Equity II+ (286-12) a few weeks ago. It would have been a "good enough" system for this purpose.

Sigh.

Any other ideas on why this isn't working? I'm at wit's end.

just use ide and be done with it. Not worth keeping you up a night worrying about it.

Thanks, but I'm not looking for advice on "what to use".

Have you checked if the hard drive controller is actually present in the device listing in CheckIt for example?

Hmmm... no I didn't, but I don't recall CheckIt having a device list. I wonder if I'm using an old version... mine doesn't list a version number on startup.

Problem solved. One of the HDD cables was bad. Weird symptoms spawned by this... impacting floppy performance.

precaud wrote:

Hmmm... no I didn't, but I don't recall CheckIt having a device list. I wonder if I'm using an old version... mine doesn't list a version number on startup.

It doesn't but it has IRQ list and HDD controller should be present at IRQ14 😉
Anyway, I'm glad you solved the problem.

HanJammer wrote:

It doesn't but it has IRQ list and HDD controller should be present at IRQ14 😉

Ah, right, I see it now. I also see that the CheckIt I'm using is ver 2.1

Are CheckIt's low-level format routines good/reliable? It's a simpler user interface than SpeedStor. And convenient to have resident with its HDD performance test, for optimizing interleave...

I never tried it. I always use AMI BIOS built in Diagnostic utility to mess with my MFM stuff (because that's BIOS used on 90% of my 286 motherboards including my main rig I use to test stuff). I guess I should try it. CheckIt 3.0 is (for no specific reason) my favourite version BTW...