286 PC random lockups \ VOGONS

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 7, by pan069

Posted on Yesterday, 22:15

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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 7, by Aui

Posted on Today, 00:54

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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 7, by douglar

Posted on Today, 03:07

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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 7, by jakethompson1

Posted on Today, 04:18

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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 7, by renejr902

Posted on Today, 04:44

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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 7, by Jo22

Posted on Today, 05:07

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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.

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 7 of 7, by uniQ

Posted on Today, 12:35

uniQ Offline

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Thanks for the help so far. i just ordered a bunch of 512MB CF cards for testing and also a PicoMEM if it all fails. I will do some testing in the next days and report my results here. 😀

My Retro Systems

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