First post, by BloodBlight
I recently got a CompuAdd 386SX (1990 BIOS) with a 40MB HDD, and am having some issues upgrading the HDD. I have done a lot of trouble shooting, and am going to try and keep this as short as possible, so please feel free to ask me to fill in any gaps.
I have tried the following devices in all combinations, all configurations behave exactly the same, except for the original drive:
Three IDE Cables
Two IDE HDDs (very large 20 & 40GB models)
Two CF Cards (10 MB and 1 GB)
Lots of combos for drive configurations in the BIOS.
The 40MB drive that came with it works perfectly! I have NOT tried reformatting it as I kinda wanted to backup the data first, but haven’t gotten to that just yet. That is next on my list, it’s just a real pain with this case.
What happens.
I can fdisk a drive (FreeDOS), reboot and quick format it with /s no problem. I can even copy files to the drive. Attempting to boot results in a long pause and then a disk is not bootable error.
If I do a “full” format it says it is impossible because there are bad blocks inside the first five blocks… Mmk…
In SOME cases I can “type somefile.bat” and it works perfectly. But if I try and run that BAT file I get a drive not ready….
Whaaaa??? I can even taken the formatted disks to another computer and am able to see all of the files written and access them just fine.
It does this for both the IDE drives, the CF drives, all sizes, all geometries…
I am kinda stumped, I have never seen this before. Ideas?
I would do a mem test, but memtest just crashes. 😒 I only have 2MBs of RAM so, I am not sure if that is an issue. But when booting the original drive everything including Windows 3.0 works great.