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Hi need some help please!

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First post, by Toaster999

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Hi
Apologies for the long post...

Resurrecting a 486dx4 120mhz that had battery damage. That's fixed and it posts, goes into to Dos etc. A head scratcher is the hard disk. It has 2 IDE channels on the winbond card. Both work with a CD player, Dos recognises it. Tested several cables all good. The Award Bios v45.0 1993 won't recognise a hard drive though on auto detect. Both known good drives tried. One is 1.6gb the other 4gb. I have tried to set up manually is various ways including 528mb via user configured and lots of other combinations from type 1 to type 45 drives. Inputted the drive specs under normal/LBA/Large no joy.

These are type 65 drives by the way. Weirdly I got it once to recognise the 4gb as a type 1 once and got as far as being able to format it to 2 odd gb. Haven't been able to replicate that though. I tried loading WIN95 at that point and it refused of course with drive errors.

Anyway now the BIOS refuses to acknowledge either drive returning a hard drive error 80 everytime (checked cable) on a setting user, type 1 to 45, tried normal/LBA/large etc etc.

Have I screwed up my controller perhaps? It still recognises CD ok on both channels using the same cable.

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 4, by Toaster999

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Current jumpers:

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Reply 2 of 4, by Nexxen

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Ok, starting with the obvious.

1) are HDD and CD-ROM correctly set to master/slave?
2) FSB speed?
3) is the card making a good connection in its slot? tried in another?
4) do you have another i/o card, ISA, to test things?

Post high def pics of the motherboard.
Rotate the middle pic, let it be easy for others to look.

PC#1 Pentium 233 MMX - 98SE
PC#2 PIII-1Ghz - 98SE/W2K

Reply 3 of 4, by waterbeesje

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Do you use VLB video as well? With a 40MHz bus it might be wise to try with the VLB wait state. 2 vlb cards and 40MHz bus sometimes just won't play nice.

Are all contacts cleaned? Try to wipe them with isopropyl alcohol, and see how much for it may have collected. All of them: pin headers and VLB/ISA edge.

You may also try with loosened ram timings.

Last but not least: get yourself a 512MB compactflash (industrial) card and adapter to ide. See if that works. Makes things easier to transfer programs and games too.

Edit: switch W10 on the controller, to set the wait state on the card. It might need to be set to 50MHz instead of 33MHz.

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 4 of 4, by Toaster999

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Fixed! Not sure what fixed it as i consolidated some of both your points. Actions taken:

1. Cleaned all the slots
2. Moved the IO card closer to the CPU and the video card to the furthest slot. Both VBL and an empty VBL slot between them. 🤣 - not sure this point made a differance I thought it might.
3. Changed wait timings
4. Changed to primary chanel as it wasn't playing ball on the secondary, and to a single disk ( no jumpers on the HD). Not tried it yet with a CD player on the secondary yet. Will try that or reconfigure to primary channel only/master HD, CD slave. Does secondary kick in only If primary is populated?
5. Auto detect worked . Not on the larger drive but on the 1.6gb. selected LBA which is right.
6.changed W10 jumper

Booted into WIN98 fine. This was on the 1.6gb already, I will use WIN95 on this computer. And the battery is saving the CMOS which is a personal victory given the VARTA battery acid damage.

That's it so far. Thanks both!

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