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Master/Slave IDE problem on 386DX with Vitex I/O card and Conner CFS425A HDD

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First post, by p6889k

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I'm trying to setup Conner CFS425A as master and IDE-CF adapter with 512MB CF as slave on my UM 386 board with Vitex EV-371 I/O card.
I'm using IDEDIAG utility to help detect the HDDs. When I setup Conner as master, the board doesn't see the CF adapter even though it's set as slave. When I setup the CF adapter as master and Conner as slave, the board sees both correctly and both work. When I setup both as slave, the board also sees both correctly, but sets up the CF adapter as master. Problem is I need to have the Conner as master as that's the HDD I intend to boot from. I also tried to set both to Master, but neither drive would be detected.
I was also able to test the Conner and CF adapter on 486 motherboard with integrated IDE controller and both worked correctly with Conner set as Master. I did not test the Vitex I/O card on the 486 as I couldn't get it to work at all despite disabling the onboard 486 controller. I also tried different cables and moving I/O card to different slots on the 386 board.

Any advice?

Conner CFS425A 425MB HDD: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/ … -ATA2-FAST.html

Vitex I/O Card: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy … drives-VIT.html

EliteGroup UM 386: https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy … drives-VIT.html

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k, 48k+, 128k, +2
Amiga 1200, 68030/40mhz
386DX/33, ET4000, SBPro2, MT32
Dual PPro/200, Millennium II, Voodoo 2, AWE32, SC-55
etc.

Reply 1 of 4, by pentiumspeed

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This is the reason I avoid Conner. We had trouble with these back in the day too. Get another hard drive that are not Conner.

Last try is set both drive as drive select and modify the cable (one wire is cut), details don't remember. Providing that both drives supports CS jumper.

Sorry.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 2 of 4, by waterbeesje

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Been there too, came a long way as well.
My 386 DX 40 runs a Conner 170MB drive and there is no way of running it along with the CDROM drive on three same IDE channel. I use a soundcard with IDE now.

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 3 of 4, by p6889k

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That's a bummer regarding Conner drives. This is my only really old HDD and was hoping to use it for that nice retro experience with loud/clicking seeks and keeping the CF card as slave when needing to copy over large files. I guess i'll stick with just the Conner drive for now and copy files over network - just got that setup in Win3.11, have seen transfer speed as high as 130kb/s 😀 in few of the file transfers I've done so far.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k, 48k+, 128k, +2
Amiga 1200, 68030/40mhz
386DX/33, ET4000, SBPro2, MT32
Dual PPro/200, Millennium II, Voodoo 2, AWE32, SC-55
etc.

Reply 4 of 4, by waterbeesje

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For file transfer under PC DOS 5.02 / MS DOS 6 and up you may also use laplink and intersvr / interlnk. Over parallel port you'll get speeds that will be ok. Under Windows you can get decent networking as well.

Stuck at 10MHz...

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