Disruptor, yes sir... that was what it showed.

I took this before I screwed everything up.

These are the new DOM's I am planning to use.

Do you have any other equipment or just the laptop? Like any other PCs with an IDE connector.
How did you connect the DOM to the modern machine? Can you post a photo of that.
You can also try a linux livecd to at least format and put an MBR on the DOM.

Then you can try with Freedos or DOS proper if you have it.

This is how I was connecting them to IDE reader.

Note: the male adapter to IDE reader is a mirror? adapter. I purchased that separately, and is what I had to use to read my old DOM's.

I had originally just used a male/male ribbon cable, which didn't allow communication.

Hmmm, couldn't edit above post

*IDE reader is USB*

Question about do I have any other equipment.

Kind of. I bought 2 other MB's Socket 7 for backups for this machine, and could probably put together a complete computer. But... with the lack of knowledge I've been having thus far... it maybe too steep of a learning curve for me at this point.
I may try and find a Windows 95 computer.

I'm even more nervous now that Jakethompson1 mentioned switching HDD wasn't recommended back in the day.

I'm still processing that. I know the answer to that is in this thread thanks to you guys... but there are many things I have to research to fully understand the why's and why not.

Might as well show you guys what you all have been helping me with

Oh, it's a CNC converted bridegeport 3axis!

Those are normally manually controlled milling machines. The NC controller is an aftermarket addon for those.

JonnyQuest wrote on 2025-04-01, 15:05:

Hmmm, couldn't edit above post […]
Show full quote

Hmmm, couldn't edit above post

*IDE reader is USB*

Question about do I have any other equipment.

Kind of. I bought 2 other MB's Socket 7 for backups for this machine, and could probably put together a complete computer. But... with the lack of knowledge I've been having thus far... it maybe too steep of a learning curve for me at this point.
I may try and find a Windows 95 computer.

I'm even more nervous now that Jakethompson1 mentioned switching HDD wasn't recommended back in the day.

I'm still processing that. I know the answer to that is in this thread thanks to you guys... but there are many things I have to research to fully understand the why's and why not.

Here's the skinny. The IDE Autodetection routines, and how the bios does CHS for that given drive, can vary between machines of that era. It was a transitional period, in which LBA was not yet a thing, and ECHS/Large Mode were 'new' and 'draft spec'.

As such, the values one motherboard spits out for CHS, and what another spits out for the same drive, can be different.

Since this is using CHS addressing, and not LBA, the partition table, and FAT structure in the FS, will track sectors as combinations of sectors, heads, and cylinders, and if that information is not reported correctly, the data fetched from the drive wont be the correct data, on the foriegn machine.

This is why I suggested putting the DOM in the machine, running autodetect, then WRITING DOWN the geometry the target system reports. This is the importnt bit, as this needs to be defined on the virtual machine.

Then, imaging the DOM with something like Etcher or Winimage, feeding the disk image WITH THE CHS INFO YOU WROTE DOWN to the VM, then setting up the virtual clone, then when it's all done, write the raw image BACK to the DOM.

Then crossing your fingers.

Ideally, this *should* work, since the partitions will be made with dos fdisk, will be cylinder aligned, and made with the geometry the 486 detected. Returned data should be the correct data.

^Acronis True Image 7, 9 and 10 do have a bootable emergency medium.
One is based on Linux, one on DOS.

Using the DOS based one (in an emulator) it might be possible to convert the source HDD to the target HDD.

That's because the DOS version uses BIOS parameters for HDD.

The positive thing about this is that things like bootsetors remain intact.
True Image keeps track of such things, if it's a supported filesystem.

If it's RAW filesystem type, it won't adapt filesystem but makes an 1:1 sector copy.

Edit: The recovery CD of ATI is bootable can be downloaded on the web (the trial version).
There are other solutions, of course. It just came to mind.

486 predates eltorito standard. That came out in early pentiums.

Bootable CD not an option without XTIDE, or bootable floppy chainloader, like plopboot.

User does not have a functioning diskette drive. Otherwise the 3 disk set for dos install is the recommended path.

Since they cant do that, 'ugly kludge with a virtual machine' becomes the 'no additional cost or setup' option.

XTIDE on a NIC would be a fantastic consideration here, but would require additional setup, configuration, and purchase.

It's not a converted machine, this one is the way it came from Bridgeport. Enclosure is off for cleaning.

I'm following what you're saying weird_w.

But... the only communication to the MB currently is the single IDE. The floppy drives I've tried don't seem to communicate in BIOS. I did purchase a new floppy on Ebay that was touted as being able to work on this system.

I'm assuming to view that CHS info, it's done in DOS? Or is there a way to view that in BIOS?

I will research CHS info more.

I did purchase an Xtide from glitchworks.

I originally thought it would be plug and play for the SD card IDE adapter.

I tried Etcher, but I couldn't get the source and target to view in W10 to transfer the files. I even tried it on my XP. Same deal.

I really should try the floppy again. If I can get a DOS Bootable disk in there, it would get me so much closer to results.

you mention you have a xt ide, im assuming it has a ide or compact flash socket. If you havnt try to run the xt ide but leave the bios drives to none and if possible disable the internal ide controller.
basically you have to be sure the xtide is not port conflicting with another device.
Did you ever see the xt bios overlay?

Edit: there is also a bootable floppy version of the XT IDE univereal bios.
You might find a gotek floppy emulator useful as well

CHS stands for Cylinders, Heads, Sectors.

It's a logical addressing schema. Heads is roughly equivalent to the number of platters in a spinny disk (in practice it's often not, but this was aimed at old fashioned mfm based drives with stepper motors, not fancy IDE drives with voice coils and fancy integrated drive controllers doing layers on layers of translation underneath), cylinders is roughly equivalent to the number of tracks on the platter, and sectors is the number of sectors each track contains.

One can then state, eg, 'get me the 15th sector, under head 0, on track 12' and the drive controller issues the move commands to position the drive head assembly, reads the data off the platter, and returns the requested sector.

It has been superceeded by the vastly superior LBA schema, which tells the drive 'Give me sector #Foo', where #Foo is a 48bit number.

This sector can be physically anywhere on the drive, the drive controller's firmware handles that.

This 486 predates LBA, and cant handle LBA based addressing in partition tables (without help).

Booting from CDRom is accomplished with an industry standard called 'eltorito'. (It's named after a mexican food place where the 2 computer scientists that drafted it sat down for lunch, when they hammered it out). It requires the bios to know how to obey the spec, and since this 486 is older than the spec, that's just not sensible.

If you add an aftermarket rom bios upgrade (which is what XTIDE is!), then it can boot from CDRom drives, AND do LBA addressing.

It does this, because old bioses like this can start bootable option roms, and then the option rom takes over disk control, and provides the needed facilities, even on very old machines like this one.

You dont have an old ISA network card with a boot prom socket laying around, nor a means to program an eprom to configure and flash the XTIDE bootrom, so this is a dead end.

EDIT: But you DO have an XTIDE equipped IDE controller? GREAT! Pop it in an empty slot, set drive type in the bios to NONE, and let XTIDE handle it!

You dont have bootable diskettes/working diskette drives, so not an option.

Which leaves us with 'dirty kludge with a virtual machine, and holding your nose just right, with hopes and prayers.'

wierd_w wrote on 2025-04-01, 16:09:

486 predates eltorito standard. That came out in early pentiums.

Qemu, Bochs or PCem/86Box do seem to support booting from CD depending on machine type and can mount binary images (*.img, *.ima).

Acronis True Image 7 also had the option to build a set of bootable 1,44 MB floppies.

The idea is to let Acronis do the conversion, the stretching.
It can turn a 20 MB source partition to a 200 MB destination partition without data loss.
It does so by changing cluster sizes etc.

The advantage is that the new destination HDd remains bootable, no re-installation needed.

That works with known partitions only, of course. FAT, FAT32, maybe NTFS/HPFS but not EXT2.

Edit: It was just an idea. If it's too complicated to you guys, you can use the sledgehammer approach and do everything by hand.
Create partitions, copy things with xcopy, make it bootable etc.
Each to his own. 🙂

Edit: You can also consider File Maven 3. It's a Norton Commander with an FTP-style file copier.
Works with serial and parallel. Might be wort considering for filetransfer.

The issue, is that a brand new DOM wont have a partition table to stretch. 😁

I just tried 31/2" 144mb floppy again. Formatted a disk on my XP to Dos boot disk. Made sure BIOS was set to this type of disk on A: ... computer goes directly to blinking cursor. Weird thing is that I can't ctrl alt delete to restart it with drive plugged in.

I didn't know you should set drive to none with Xtide plugged in. I always did autodetect and accepted those settings

I just want to make sure this is correct.

Red stripe on ribbon cable towards pin 1.
This is for plugging in XTIDE.

*the DOM doesn't have an arrow depiction for pin one or polarity. It's plugged directly into board. And if I'm going by ribbon cable middle raised notch to DOM raised notch... DOM has been always plugged in upside down?

Maybe a game changer. I found an old Gotek

Computer does seem to recognize it

Now I have to figure out how to use it

Windows 95 was created with the 486dx-33 in Mind.
As long as you have 8mb or Memory and a CDROM drive.
Installing on a Compact Flash card works Very Good.

From my experience Windows 95 is the Best Operating system for the 486 computer with 8mb of Memory or More.

Just get a DOS Bootable Floppy Disk with with CDROM support.
Boot off the Floppy then install Win95 from install CD.