Hi there!

Do I have to boot it a different way?
Does anyone have a picture I could use for reference?
All I know now is that when I boot and load dos from my floppy, I don't see a C: drive.

Yes, you have to press A when XT-IDE has detected your CF card.
Otherwise DOS won't see the CF card.

After DOS has loaded, run FDISK and create a primary partition.
Then exit FDISK. It will reboot the computer.

Then repeat first step by pressing A again.
Run FORMAT C: /S. After completion, the CF card should be bootable.

Note: If you have an old DOS (v 3.x) you must run FORMAT C: and SYS C: separately.
Older DOS has 32MB partition limit, though. Except Compaq DOS 3.31, which has 512MB partition limit.

Good luck! 😃👍

Much appreciated Jo22! I will give that a shot and see what happens.

Do you know if I have to plug anything else into it? I see a few empty connectors.

Auzlin wrote on 2025-01-18, 05:57:

Much appreciated Jo22! I will give that a shot and see what happens.

Do you know if I have to plug anything else into it? I see a few empty connectors.

Hi! Good luck! 🙂

No, you don't need to connect anything else.

There are optional connectors for a) HDD activity LED b) an internal IDE drive c) MicroRAM daughter card.

That daugher card is available optional.
It allows adding memory below 1MB in 64KB steps.
The connector is meant to save a slot (XTs had few slots left).

Edit: There's also space for a not populated power plug next to the IDE connector.
If installed, it was meant to power an internal CF card reader (they often use floppy power cable).
That's just an ordinary floppy power connector for sake of conveniance.
The XT-IDE card draws power from ISA slot, it needs no extra power.

Great info, thank you! Your instructions work, my PC is running smooth. Woohoo! 🎉

Sorry to hijack this thread, but that ide is port there can it be use to connect to IDE ATAPI CD drive ?

amontre wrote on 2026-06-24, 10:58:

Sorry to hijack this thread, but that ide is port there can it be use to connect to IDE ATAPI CD drive ?

I think ATAPI assumes 16 bit transfers. To make it work with 8bit transfers, you'd need firmware for the CD drive that detects when the system only supports 8bit transfers, falls back to 8 bit transfers and then get a custom CD driver for DOS that can work with that.

amontre wrote on 2026-06-24, 10:58:

Sorry to hijack this thread, but that ide is port there can it be use to connect to IDE ATAPI CD drive ?

I said in my last post that the ATAPI drive itself would need to support 8bit transfers. That wasn't correct. Looks like a lot of XTide cards do 16-8 bit MUX. https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/lo-tech-8-bit-ide-a … ter-mux-design/ So they do dual 8 bit transfers from the CPU to the Card over the ISA bus, but then the card does 16 bit transfers to the ATA storage device and the opposite on the return.

And that's why the long standing status for ATAPI over 8bit was: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/xti … e-7#post-265363
"You cannot connect an ATAPI device to XTIDE unless the ATAPI driver supports dual 8-bit data ports that the XTIDE uses. There are no such drivers."

Curiously, the XUB release this month has some ambitious new features: https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/changeset/ … deuniversalbios
"Created MODULE_ATAPI which adds a very simplistic detection of ATAPI devices. This is WIP so it's not included in any builds because I'm not able to test it and the chances of it working are slim to none."

Maybe some day they will have working ATAPI support in XUB where you don't even need to load a CD ROM driver, the XUB bios will have that support. That would be something. If any driver was going to support dual 8-bit ports, that would be the one. Or maybe someone will hack up an existing driver in the meantime.

douglar wrote on 2026-06-25, 14:50:

I said in my last post that the ATAPI drive itself would need to support 8bit transfers. That wasn't correct. Looks like a lo […]
Show full quote

amontre wrote on 2026-06-24, 10:58:

Sorry to hijack this thread, but that ide is port there can it be use to connect to IDE ATAPI CD drive ?

I said in my last post that the ATAPI drive itself would need to support 8bit transfers. That wasn't correct. Looks like a lot of XTide cards do 16-8 bit MUX. https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/lo-tech-8-bit-ide-a … ter-mux-design/ So they do dual 8 bit transfers from the CPU to the Card over the ISA bus, but then the card does 16 bit transfers to the ATA storage device and the opposite on the return.

And that's why the long standing status for ATAPI over 8bit was: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/xti … e-7#post-265363
"You cannot connect an ATAPI device to XTIDE unless the ATAPI driver supports dual 8-bit data ports that the XTIDE uses. There are no such drivers."

Curiously, the XUB release this month has some ambitious new features: https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/changeset/ … deuniversalbios
"Created MODULE_ATAPI which adds a very simplistic detection of ATAPI devices. This is WIP so it's not included in any builds because I'm not able to test it and the chances of it working are slim to none."

Maybe some day they will have working ATAPI support in XUB where you don't even need to load a CD ROM driver, the XUB bios will have that support. That would be something. If any driver was going to support dual 8-bit ports, that would be the one. Or maybe someone will hack up an existing driver in the meantime.

Aside from certain XT-CFs designed for CF cards supporting 8 bit mode only, most XT-IDE cards have do some extra 74 series logic on them to split reads and merge writes to the 16 bit data port, yes.
Conceivably the only thing stopping an ATAPI CD-ROM is indeed a suitable driver. There are no real roadblocks to this. Just as I patched the XCDROM.SYS code to reset the speed every time a new disc is inserted Re: Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS? (CDBQ would need to be rerun to do that for drives that reset when the tray opens) the code could similarly be patched.

The three issues are, different port range from IDE, 8 bit reads/writes (ie, double the count in cx and rep insb/outsb instead of w), and if XCDROM.SYS uses interrupt driven operation (haven't looked), rewrite it for polling mode as most XT-IDE configurations don't have any IRQ hooked up due to their scarcity on XTs and no benefit for DOS since the BIOS spins waiting on the IRQ anyway.

Perhaps the ATAPI support is aimed at El Torito. I doubt it is for driverless operation, which has obstacles of CD-ROMs not being FAT file systems, and ZIP drives not being divided into partitions, so DOS can't deal with them as Int 13h drives anyway.