Most Old 486 cannot see a 10GB HD proper, drive size BIOS limitation, that is probably the first problem. Without a floppy drive you can work with on a second computer becomes the next bigger problem.
I will look around for some docs on the Vectra VL2..

Horun wrote on 2023-03-28, 07:01:

Most Old 486 cannot see a 10GB HD proper, drive size BIOS limitation, that is probably the first problem. Without a floppy drive you can work with on a second computer becomes the next bigger problem.
I will look around for some docs on the Vectra VL2..

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Yeah, I understand that it probably is not happy with the hard drive. But why is it trying to boot to DOS than? and why double-beeping AFTER?

I will probably buy a IDE-CF or IDE-SD adapter in any case, but have no money for it before I get paid next time. For now i'm stuck with what I have.

This has some info on the Vectra VL series. https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/manual/19 … 47041054379.pdf
Do you know the product number ?

Yeah it's D3113-60100(as the sticker on case back says)serial number D3113A, but motherboard is D3121-69001 BIOS version number is GA.04.10

BIOS is next to latest so that is good. The stock HD in all the VL and VLe are all 540MB or less if I read the pdf proper. A 10Gb exceeds two max size levels, one being the possible 8Gb of BIOS HD support (or it could be 540MB) and also the DOS/FAT16 limit of 2GB. If you made the partition greater than 2GB that will not work, also if you try to exceed the 8GB (8.4GB) for a drive it will cause issues too.
Also the pdf says the cdrom is scsi ?
How big is you primary DOS partition ?

Horun wrote on 2023-03-29, 01:31:

Also the pdf says the cdrom is scsi ?
How big is you primary DOS partition ?

CD-ROM is 3rd-party just generic IDE 52x LG linked on the same IDE as HDD (i think it was installed there just to fill the hole, because previous owner does not have that pretty gray cover for 5' slot)
Primary Partition now 2gb(Maximum that DOS made itself without Large disc support) Everything else is blank.
BIOS sees HDD as 8gb

I'll try to reformat to less than 500mb today's night. Sorry, for a slow responce, I just got myself to PC.

P.S. My friend did a bootable FDs for me with DOS 6.22 and Win98/95 floppy bootdiscs , so we probably will have some more possibilities soon. He will send me some spare hardware too. But he lives pretty far away from me, so it will take a bit of a time.

Yesterday I had no luck with the machine. Results are pretty much the same with less than 500mb Partition.

Ok, I have some news. I got a mail today with some floppy disks and some hardware.

What can I say: machine is booting from windows 98 boot diskette and can run utilities from it if the HDD is absolutely clear or not connected. (or it have the partitions that Dos/win95-98 does not support)
If I switch off the hard drive at all the machine is working pretty ok with floppy+CD configuration. i can browse files and so on. But right after i go fdisk- create pratitons - reboot(no matter how big partitions and how many of them are) after reboot I'm getting the same stuck machine. Looks like the machine is trying to boot from FDD( i hear like half of the needed sound sequence of FDD sounds 🤣), but at some point it just hang in nowhere and everything stops working(like earlier)

With this disks in the mail I got:
- a few spare 3,5 working FDD and one working 5'25 FDD.
- another 2 hard drives, but both probably not supported too, because it's 10 gig and 80 gig(haha, yeah 80 gigs on this) the behaviour of Vectra with 2nd 10 gig drive is the same, 80 is not visible at all, obviously.=)
- ISA Multi-IO card with FDD and HDD controller and some parallel and game ports. I tried to make it work, but with no any luck, but person who sent me 100% tested it. SO it's my hands or Vectra, not the card itself. Basically I just don't know what i need to do with it to make it work except change "integrated" to "external" in BIOS.

I did it!!!

My friend gave me an Idea today. Lowering Cil Heads Sectors ranges before machine can get correctly working HDD size in POST. The rest was kinda boring trial-and-error ansvering a question "how many of this things Vectra can allocate actually?"

Aaand i got 10000Cil 16 heads. It gave me around 4gig disk space. And everything is working now.

I have working machine!
Sorry for not authentic LCD panel. 😉 I have good CRT for this baby, but for diagnosis purposes it was better to have PC on my working table.)

KirillK wrote on 2023-03-28, 19:04:

Yeah it's D3113-60100(as the sticker on case back says)serial number D3113A, but motherboard is D3121-69001 BIOS version number is GA.04.10

Any chance we can get you to copy and upload that BIOS file? I can't find anything newer than GA.04.06 (which is what mine is running...)

deepthaw wrote on 2023-11-28, 06:01:

KirillK wrote on 2023-03-28, 19:04:

Yeah it's D3113-60100(as the sticker on case back says)serial number D3113A, but motherboard is D3121-69001 BIOS version number is GA.04.10

Any chance we can get you to copy and upload that BIOS file? I can't find anything newer than GA.04.06 (which is what mine is running...)

Sorry, I got unlogined for a while and did not noticed the message. I have no idea how to dump it, I do not have any external ROM readers and vectra do not have BIOS on separate chip. If it's possible to dump it from windows or DOS, i will help.