serialShinobi wrote on 2023-01-20, 14:25:

Hello. I'm currently working with a socket 5 motherboard and pentium 100 MHz CPU. It is a soyo sy-033a and I have no clue how they planned on the user installing an OS. There isn't a ide disk or floppy connector on the motherboard. I have two "legacy" ISA slot IDE interfaces, but accessing a CD-ROM, 1.44 floppy, or ATA 1.0 200 MB hard drive is difficult. I wonder if a PCI 2.1 interface and Ultra ATA CD-ROM and hard disk would be more compatible. Seems like there must be manufacturers that cut costs when supporting ISA on newer PCI systems. Is this a common problem with ISA/PCI motherboards?

That's old enough that using a separate disk controller would have been common. Probably a separate serial/parallel IO card, too, if you want those ports. Integrating all of that on to the MB didn't really become the norm until a bit later.

serialShinobi wrote on 2023-01-20, 14:25:

Seems like there must be manufacturers that cut costs when supporting ISA on newer PCI systems. Is this a common problem with ISA/PCI motherboards?

Hello.

As the above post stated, the IDE, floppy, parallel and serial ports weren't integrated into motherboards until later. Having fewer ISA slots is common at this point because the PCI ones are significantly faster.

It was fairly normal to have onboard I/O by Pentium times, but boards like that were sold for the cheapskates who didn't want to pay the extra $20 for onboard and use all the i/o off their 486 board or whatever they were upgrading from.... or may have been seen as desirable to those who wanted a SCSI interface instead.

PCI boards with no i/o were just uncommon enough, even at the time, that getting hold of a decent PCI i/o card was and is a problem, they were not as mass market as ISA or VLB i/o cards. The easiest way now is to use an ISA i/o for serial, parallel, floppy, game if equipped and soundcard isn't, and either disable the IDE ports or set them to tertiary or quaternary addresses if possible. Then use a Promise Ultra ATA card on PCI to give decent IDE drive performance. Though it may be possible to use a PCI SATA card instead, but not without some pitfalls and extra workarounds.

Anyway, circa 1996 if you got this bare machine, with some kind of floppy and IDE interfaces, if you wanted to install DOS and Windows, you'd boot the first DOS disk from floppy, run the install and it would set up your HDD.. then when DOS was on there, next pile of floppies, run the install and feed them as it asks would be the Windows 3.xx floppies..... For windows 95 at the time, there was a rarer floppy install version which came as a whole brick of disks, or the normal version which was a boot floppy and a CD, which was not bootable then, you started it up on the floppy and the installer ran from floppy found the CD and pulled files from that. Later, when enough machines supported CD boot in their BIOS (Not a given) and later optical drives supported the ability to boot (Also not a given until 8x was common) then versions of Windows 98 came on CDs which could be booted, though many still needed to use boot floppy and CD Win95 method.

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/soyo-sy-033a

Normally a board like that would probably use a isa I/O card. This wasn’t very common on socket 5 though. Most socket 5 had onboard.

Anyway,

I’d actually recommend you get a blue lava xt-ide with onboard cf or a promise sata II 300 tx4 and a 2.5” sata to sata m.2 atapter.

Your floppy should come from the isa I/O card

I would rather recommend something more realistic for that computer regarding HDD and CD drives, PCI IDE controllers.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-01-20, 16:24:

I would rather recommend something more realistic for that computer regarding HDD and CD drives, PCI IDE controllers.

I use that controller on most all my socket 5/7
builds. That is why I recommend it.

I like that it has onboard cd booting and doesn’t rely on the system bios much.

There are many ways to set this up.

Here is another option that I have had good success with on boards of this era

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-01-20, 17:34:

I use that controller on most all my socket 5/7 builds. That is why I recommend it. […]
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Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-01-20, 16:24:

I would rather recommend something more realistic for that computer regarding HDD and CD drives, PCI IDE controllers.

I use that controller on most all my socket 5/7
builds. That is why I recommend it.

I like that it has onboard cd booting and doesn’t rely on the system bios much.

There are many ways to set this up.

Here is another option that I have had good success with on boards of this era

Hi, Sphere478,

The PCI card with dual CF slots with boot rom you suggested is not found on ebay, no matter how I try to search, where it it?

Cheers,

I have a Soyo SY-029C2 which is a Socket 5/Neptune board from the same era (mid-1994). It is equally bare as yours when it comes to I/O integration. Looks like Soyo wanted to cut as much cost as possible in this era.

Personally I use an ASUS PCI-SC200 SCSI controller for the hard drive, it has no BIOS but the board has an integrated NCR SCSI BIOS which is compatible with that card. If you don't have SCSI, one of those PCI IDE controllers with a paddle board would be a good solution I think.

You'll still need a regular ISA I/O card for the floppy, serial and parallel ports (and optionally IDE if you don't go the PCI route). But keep in mind that you may need to disable the IDE ports from the ISA card so they don't conflict with the PCI controller.

I have not returned to this topic for awhile but in this time I've learned much from the replies here and on my own I've read about important working details of the ibm-pc hardware.

To start off with, this thread is about a socket 5 mother board I got that didn't come with on board support for a mouse, floppy, or hard drive.

I found, to my shock, correct all who explained that there were some motherboards from the Socket 5 years didn't have built in I/O and IDE (floppy being part of the ATA-1/IDE specs). I've been shopping for a new motherboard and noticed many small business/distributor motherboards - they seem brandless. Most OEM boards do without on board interfaces.

I was at first unable to use anything even with an IDE card. But I had a 1999 E Series Aptiva. One lone ISA slot had my Acculogic sIDE-3 and floppies, IDE Hdd, and cd-rom worked. This Aptiva had on board interfaces and none were used during the test.

My next move was reading the datasheet for the GoldStar IC on the interface. That showed that they use one IRQ line connected to the bus. I have seen on fdc/ IDE interface that auto assigns IRQ numbers. My guess is my interface must be auto assigning and address that conflicts - because my BIOS is anemic.

Initially information I located about jumpers was about a different interface not at all like mine. Later when I located the correct info I discovered the interface IDE had no jumper at all on a block to activate IRQ 14 to make it primary. Floppy remained unusable.

I warn folks that cf cards and modern windows involve safe guards that prevent windows 95 from accessing the cf card. Most likely because I'm using virtualbox which is a "hosted" hypervisor - it's like using a windows application to access the bootsector of a virtual hard drive on the cf card. I could not make this work. I know imaging is the next route here because it cuts out the hypervisor. I did try imaging a floppy and got a win 95 boot disk but needed the Aptiva to make it. Hard drives would need VHD and could image there. But no plans for that now.

I want to add that a cheap USB 2.0 cf card reader was ruining my cf cards and making them unusable. I replaced the USB 2.0 with USB 3.x. My USB 3.x reader used a 3.x cable with a USB C connected to my laptop running windows 11 and at the other end a type micro a/b which has extra pins for power.

I got past my cf problem by I trying a IDE to USB cable to employ the process of using virtualbox on a 3.8 GB UltraATA/33 hard drive and there was no problem issued from windows 95 format command.

But the 16-bit controller only deals in FAT16. My handiwork was FAT32.

This weekend I installed in my SOYO SY-033A disks and interface consisting of:

EIDE UltaATA 33 3.4 GB disk initialized on the APTIVA, using on board EIDE headers.

A Promise Technology PCI controller - also UltraATA 33.

The interface auto configures the settings but no luck. The BIOS had user defined CHD for the disk. You can't turn off an interface because there is none. I am pretty sure BIOS was detecting my older IDE disk on the acculogic controller. Maybe in their cheapness they only ordered BIOS that supported older cheaper IDE-1.

I agree with Sphere's idea of using a PCI based SATA interface and SATA to m.2 adapter. It's just a great idea because it's disk based which are easier to use than CF cards.

The MobRules takes the route of using motherboard supported manufacturer for a SCSI interface as he mentioned in his post above. This is essentially the way out. My motherboard also mentions NCR in the docs. But I have yet to deal with floppy and how to initialize steps. There's a USB adapter for 50 pin SCSI but it's rare - that's code for expensive.