Could it be I’m getting this message because maybe I have the ide data cable the wrong way around on the ch ide card adapter

from OP, via DM […]
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from OP, via DM

Hi sorry to bother you I was wondering if you could find and send a link of a nother ide card that would work
With a ch ide card adapter on my epson 286 pc the reason being I want to buy another ide card
For a spare if you could I’d really appreciate it regards jude

I dont think your IDE card is at fault.

CF cards can take liberties with pin assignments on the IDE cable. Two common ones are putting +5v on pin 20, which on classic machines, should be not connected-- and the other is doing strange things with the ALE signal on pin 28.

Both of these can cause 'hangs during detection' on vintage machines.

'CF hangs on detection' is a very common problem, with a lot of possible causes. See for instance, all of these...

Re: CF IDE device + 486 mobo = failure

386 AMI bios wait infinitely when cf card connected

Re: CF card options for HDD replacement

And a lot more. It's very common.
This is why I suggest more eyeballs.

This discussion should be in the public thread. Please try to keep it contained to just one thread as well.

I have moved this out accordingly.

For completeness, they asked me about the IDE card I suggested.

I returned this annotated image.

And this accompanying reply.

---
The external floppy diskette provision is unpopulated, and this is perfectly fine. You will have a very hard time finding both the connector, AND any drives that could live on it. It was a very short-lived external peripheral for XT systems, and used a special connector. Its mostly just a curiosity. Just pointing it out for completeness.

You can find a reddit post about this peripheral here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … external_drive/

This card has a built in floppy diskette controller. Depending on how your serial and parallel ports are provided in your system, you might want to turn this function off on this card, which is why I have pointed out where the silkscreening says the controlling jumpers are located.

Often times, the floppy diskette controller, the serial ports, and the parallel port, all live on the same card in systems of this vintage. Since we know where to turn it off on this card, (and maybe dont on any existing multi-IO card that is serving your LPT and serial ports), it might be sensible to turn it off, and not connect anything at all to the floppy diskette provision on this card. (You would instead connect the floppy diskette drives to the floppy diskette controller connector on the IO board containing the serial and parallel ports.)

This card is a dual IDE controller. It is both a primary and secondary IDE controller on the same card. It can provide support for 4 IDE devices, 2 per IDE port. (A master, and a slave.) This means you could put IDE CDROM/DVDROM drives on the secondary channel, if you wanted.

The jumpers on the card configure if these controllers are enabled or not, and what IO Port / IRQ they use (So the card can coexist with other disk controllers) Consult the manual I gave you a link to earlier for details.

Assuming that its all set to defaults, the primary IDE controller port will have IO address 1F0, IRQ14, and the secondary will have IO address 170, IRQ15. Looking at your card, this is how it is configured.

One thing to take significant note of!

This card has a ROM bios on it. This maps into the adapter ROM region at a configurable memory location. That location must not have anything already living there.

This card is currently configured for C800, which is very likely to collide with a VGA video bios. (Though some are small enough they might not. 286 systems often came stock with Hercules monochrome cards [which have the bios video code inside they main system rom bios, that lives at F000-FFFF], or a CGA video adapter card, which has a ROM bios living at A000, if memory serves me right-- I AM getting old) Because of this, the card allows configurations that are very likely to not play nice with a VGA card installed. ) The location in memory where the card's ROM BIOS gets mapped is configurable, and is set using jumpers labelled ROM and SHA. There is a table showing which of 4 possible locations are possible, below the resistor pack near the card edge of the card, just right of the jumper block strip.

ROM (ON) + SHA (ON) == C800
ROM (ON) + SHA (OFF) == CCoo
ROM (OFF) + SHA (ON) == D800
ROM (OFF) + SHA (OFF) == DC00

I would suggest setting the address to D800. This will be guaranteed to not collide with a VGA BIOS. Setting it to CC00 will only collide with larger VGA bioses. The D800 setting will also set the "size" of the ROM BIOS to 32kb size, which is important to know if you want to replace this chip with an EEPROM containing XT-IDE XUB later. Looks like the maximum size ROM this card can support is 32k, but that's plenty for XT-IDE.

For reference, VGA rom bios starts at C000. D000 is "Usually not in use". D800 is the safest place, but if your video bios is small, (under 32k), then CC00 will give you more efficient upper memory area free.

At this point, I'd like to request images of how you are cabling your CF adapter, Jude.

Hi here’s 3 photos of how I have the adapter connected to the card and it shows how Ive
Got the idea data cables connected hope this helps

Looks like the cable orientation is correct.

I would suspect 'pin 20 needs clipped', or 'CF Card not fully ATA compliant.'

Do you have any spinny IDE disks to test with?

i dont have any compact flash adapters in that format (only sdcard) but its odd the cable is oriented over the adapter. Although that dot on the left does suggest pin 1 is on that side.
Does the CF card in use work on a modern pc? This might be a problem with card itself. If it works on a modern pc it might be worth recreating the msdos partition table and create small fat16 partition.
Do you have another ide cable to try?
Is there a jumper on the adapter for master/slave/cable? Id try either master or card select.
Is there another PC with isa nearby to prove out the hardware? Or an ide port to test the cable+adapter+card.
Double check the CF pins, ive had some adapters bend the pin and then it never worked right.
Be careful laying the CF adapter on that power supply you might short out the bottom. Put paper/cardboard/mousepad or something underneath.
You also might consider getting a xt-ide board, fairly affordable, more so if you can solder one together yourself.

Thanks for the messages and advice I’ll have a look and see if there’s any jumpers

Hi I had a look at the adapter there’s no jumpers on it to change there is however jumpers on the actual ide card that I haven’t changed yet as I don’t know whether I need to

hi just thought ide share the card adapter that im using i brought this of ebay and this is the actual link of the one i brought
i thought maybe some one could let me know if its the right one im using
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/126953729509

I think there’s jumpers on the ide controller data card but I’m not sure

Also I wonder is it best to attach the ch card adapter to the primary ide slot 1 or primary ide slot 2 as shown in
The photo above of the actual card

On the CF card. It's hard to see which CF adater model you have, but assuring you dont have '5v mode' turned on, (as far as I know, most modern cf modules are 3v), it's probably 'pin 20 needs to be clipped', or 'pin 28 is being asserted wrong', imo.

Hi you mentioned clipping pin 20 /pin28 is being asserted wrong I’m a bit confused on what you mean by that

jude1977 wrote on Today, 06:15:

hi just thought ide share the card adapter that im using i brought this of ebay and this is the actual link of the one i brought
i thought maybe some one could let me know if its the right one im using
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/126953729509

ok these are the kind i use so i think you have the cable reversed on both ends, your cable must be older and without the key in the outer middle.
its typically ok to do this with the older non keyed cables. You could reverse the connections but i dont think its the problem.
there is no jumper on these to select master/slave which is what i was referring to.
i would try other sdcards, lower the capacity the better. Try the sdcard in a modern adapter and see if comes up.
there is that active led that should flicker if normal communication occurs.

try to eliminate possibilities with other computers.
with a sdcard reader you can validate the sdcard works and what partition table it uses.
with another ide cable motherboard you can verify the cable and the adapter and the sdcard
with another isa capable motherboard you can verify the ide card to the sdcard.

this is the xt ide card, but it uses compact flash
https://www.ebay.com/itm/136804791163?_skw=xt … ABk9SR_yPosHpZw

Concerning pin28...

This pin is where 'cable select' signal is asserted. Cable-select is an 'alternative' to jumpering the drive as master/slave. It works by asserting a line level signal of 'on', to designate 'master' operation, or 'off', to designate 'slave' mode operation. Some cards, and some adapters don't really behave correctly with this signal asserted.

Concerning pin 20:

Pin 20 was originally meant to stop you from putting the cable on upside down. On old cables, this pin location is absent on the connector, and is filled with plastic. On CF cards, this pin is often repurposed to supply +5v, so that you dont need to supply that voltage with a power cord. The IDE controllers in vintage computers dont like this.

Concerning 'Not fully ATA compliant'

Some cards, especially recently built ones, 'are not fully ATA compatible', and want to run in ultra DMA modes, since they are intended to be used inside cameras, and for high speed operation modes.

Vintage computers cant operate at udma modes, because the isa bus was never designed for bus mastering (copying data without cpu involvement), and moreover, isn't fast enough to transmit the data at those speeds, even if it could bus master. Instead, the card needs to fall back to legacy ATA 'programmed IO' operation. Some cards refuse to do this in the ways vintage computers need.

-- Just noticed/read this thread - some thoughts:

Some 286 era systems didn't have a board mounter CMOS battery and relied on a case holding AA cells attached with a flying lead.

Many 286 era systems didn't have BIOS with internal setup screens, and you had to boot the manufacturers setup disk to make BIOS changes.

For this reason, they would always try the system default drive type, even if the BIOS had been recnfigured.

3.5" weren't common, given the front panel bays, I'd try 5.35s both HD and DD, as that's probably what shipped with the system.

The "Enhanced IDE bios ..." message is most likely from a BIOS extension on the IDE controller. It's entirely possible that it if finds an IDE drive, it will try to boot it, and whatever it loads as the boot sector crashes the system.

Some of these early HD BIOS would always try to boot from floppy first, so that you could always boot a recovery disk.

There may be some key you can hit at startup to preent the BIOS extension from trying to boot - but that would depend on the BIOS extension.

Clearing the sectors on the boot track to all-zero might also prevent it from trying to boot frin HD.

-- These are just things I picked up over the years as I "played with" a LOT of systems - hopefully one might spark a useful idea!

Re: Ebay adapter

That's a 'sintechi' SD->IDE adapter, not a CF->IDE adapter.

Sintechi might be hanging on detection if the inserted card is reporting larger than 8gb capacity.

Try using a smaller SDCard. Something 8gb or smaller. The bios rom on the ide card has the 8gb restriction.

Edit:

Yes, the card has an eide rom bios, which supports 'up to 8gb'.

I suggested it for OP from fleabay's offers, because it has a socketted bios that is 32k in size, and could be a home for XTIDE.

Since OP is 'rolling with it', keeping within the constraints of what that bios is made for is prudent.

That’s a great lot of information thanks so much it’s all very helpful and interesting I’ll try
And give a 8 gig or smaller card a go as the other card I was using when the system hanged
Was a 32 gig card

Also on the topic of powering the card adapter would I need to power it with a power cable from the pc
Or does the card adapter power itself when the ide data cable is connected