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286 PC random lockups

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First post, by uniQ

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Some time ago, I bought a well-preserved 286 PC from Highscreen with a Octek Fox M 286 mainboard, a 16 MHz CPU from AMD and 4MB of RAM.
A few days ago, the 100MB hard drive failed, and now I’m looking for possible (modern) alternatives.

I’ve already tried using an XT-IDE Rev. 04 card, a CF card adapter, and a 4GB Transcend CF card.
MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 2.11 installed without issues, and the system boots up fine, but eventually I run into system lockups and 'division by zero' errors.
When I make changes to the autoexec.bat file, I’ve noticed that sometimes characters get swapped or deleted when saving the file.

So I suspect the problem lies with the adapters. I’ve already tested a different CF-to-IDE adapter, but that didn’t solve it.
Has anyone here experienced a similar issue?
Would a PicoMEM card be worth considering?

Thanks in advance!

My Retro Systems

Reply 1 of 6, by pan069

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I have several systems using IDE to CF adaptors (286, 386 DX/SX, 486 DX) and I have not experienced such issues at all. All of my systems use different IO controllers (the 486 is on the motherboard).

At face value I suspect that the problem might be with your IO controller. Can you share which IO controller you're using? And if you're able to, try a different one.

PS: Forgot to mention, I never used XT2IDE, as that isn't required on a 286. I only use 512MB CF cards for DOS systems.

Reply 2 of 6, by Aui

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I had similar issues many times and it is more often than not the cf card, not the adapter (either XT2IDE or standar IDEl to cf -card) or the drive geometry. In many cases, only 128 or 256 MB card work properly. This can be a trial and error Odyssee (Here an example : Dec 466d2 CF Card trouble)

Reply 3 of 6, by douglar

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Swapped characters sounds like something very unpredictable is happening, like electrical interference on a bus, bad memory used in a buffer, or a failing flash device.

Like hard drives, CF’s were made over a long period of time from a lot of vendors, so it’s hard to generalize too much, but I hear some CF cards can intermittently behave unpredictably if your isa bus is running slower than 8mhz.

Reply 4 of 6, by jakethompson1

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Chaos can happen when a Multi I/O card plus a CF-IDE adapter connects pins with a different meaning on the CF card directly to your machine's ISA bus

Pins 27 and 28 are the most suspect culprits: Plucking certain IDE pins for better CF-IDE compatibility

Reply 5 of 6, by renejr902

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i have several xt and 286 system. i always have more success with a xt-ide card that connect to a ide hdd drive than cf card. i tried a lot of hdd from 20gb to 80gb, they are works. i formatted them with 4 partition of 2gb each in dos 6.22 and i installed several games and all my xt and 286 with the hdd connected to the xt-ide card read the hdd and games perfectly.

Last edited by renejr902 on 2025-09-14, 05:12. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 6 of 6, by Jo22

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Maybe the ISA bus frequency is too high for the CF cards? Or timings are too tight?
With a passive adapter, they're sitting directly on ISA bus, after all.
In the days of PCI IDE Controllers they ran on a different speed.

Edit: Is the PC RAM okay? CheckIt v3 has a memory test, it can be run for hours.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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