Yeah, I advised that as well via DMs before bringing this perniciously troublesome system back out here for more eyeballs.

Here is the relavent page concerning how to enable/disable the floppy controller.

The jumper block in question is physically located near the HDD activity LED header.

It does look like a fairly decent AT controller for IDE drives.

It shows a shroud on IDE1 connector with they KEY on the component side of the board. IDE#2 shows pins 1&2 at the side of the connector away from the backplace - so the red wire on your ribbon cables should be at that end!

Just to confirm exactly how the jumpers are set: (forgive ASCII drawing)

1 
2   +-----+
3   | . . | Disable \ JP1
4   | === | Enable  /
5   +-----+

If the Epson already has a floppy controller (most early ATs mainboards didn't) your floppy cable would be plugged into the mainboard (or another card) and JP1 should be set DISABLE

If your floppy control is plugged into the SIIG card, JP1 should be set ENABLE

1+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
2| [ | [ | [ | [ | [ | . | . | . | I | . | . | . | \ JP2
3| ] | ] | ] | ] | ] | . | . | . | I | . | . | . | / 
4+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
5| P | S | R | S | I | I | D | D | I | I | D | D |
6| R | C | O | H | R | R | R | A | R | R | R | A |
7| I | N | M | A | Q | Q | Q | C | Q | Q | Q | C |
8| M | D |   |   | 1 | 1 | 5 | K | 1 | 1 | 6 | K |
9|   |   |   |   | 4 | 0 |   | 5 | 5 | 2 |   | 6 |
10+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

The JP2 defaults look reasonable to me:

1  PRIM 1  Enable primary IDE1
2  SCND 1  Enable secondary IDE
3   ROM 1   \ROM address C800
4   SHA 1   /
5 IRQ14 1  Irq14        \
6 IRQ10 0  -no-Irg10     > IDE#1
7  DRQ5 0  -no-DMAewq5   >
8 DACK5 0  -no-DMAack5  /
9 IRQ15 1 Irq15         \
10 IRQ12 0  -no-Irq12     > IDE#2
11  DRQ6 0  -no-DMAreq6   >
12 DACK6 0  -no-DMAack6  /

If you have only one hard drive - you could try removing SCND, but it shouldn't make a difference.

I saw mentioned earlier that you have taken one jumper OFF, and later that the ROM address is D800 - that would be the ROM jumper?
- Your screenshots show the SiiG EIDE ROM startup, and as long as you are still getting that, all is good!

Do these match the settings on your board?

Jo22 wrote on 2026-07-23, 16:56:

...It also has an extra floppy controller. I hope it 's been set to disabled if the Epson's floppy controller is used.

Does the Epson have a separate floppy controller?

So far the system was able to boot the Reference diskette ... so I doubt there's a major problem in floppy configuration.
- and I don't think a misconfigured/duplicate floppy could cause the problems being seen.

hi just a quick update i decided to take the pc to a computer repairer to try and replace the dead cmos battery he had a look at it and thinks hell be able to replace the
cmos battery with a new cmos battery he said it will probably take a week or 2 to get the new cmos battery and install it
so hopefully that will make the trouble shooting a bit easier and ill be able to save the settings so
will keep you all posted and let you know when i get the pc back

jude1977 wrote on 2026-07-24, 09:17:

... he said it will probably take a week or 2 to get the new cmos battery and install it ...

Ok, good - soujnds like he's going to replace the Dalas DS12887 RTC chip

Just a quick note/suggestion this chip as you know contains an internal battery which will eventually go dead.

Dallas ships the chip with the battery backup turned off - it turns on the first time it gets used.
and Dallas says it should last 10 years after 1st use.

But... these have been around a long time and you can't know for sure that the one you get has never been activated...

So... I'd suggest that you go back to him and ask if he can put it in a socket which will make it *much* easier to replace if you have to again.

And - if you are interested in this kind of thing, you might want to ask to get the old one back so you can try grinding it down and replacing the battery.

thanks for the advice will ask him about the socket and ill see if i can get the old one back too

FWIW - there are 3rd party replacement RTC chips that have user-replaceable batteries

Check this thread: DS12887 drop-in replacement

I've been playing a bit with "PCem" ... and today I noticed that one of the machines it allows you to emulate is: [286] Epson PC AX2e

So I gave it a try - it can boot the "reference" disk, I can run setup and it does allow me to save the settings!

But --- At startup It always gives the error: "8602 - Auxiliary device failure"
It also always sez "System options not set" - but I can see that changes I made are in fact retained (even if I completely exit and re-run PCem) - so it does seem to be saving to some extent.

I also note than within setup "Mass storage", I can configure the floppy drives (A: & B:) , but NOT the hard drives (C: & D:) which always show "Type63" and when I move to them sez:
"HDD1 (Reserved!! Can't set)"
"HDD2 (Reserved!! Can't set)"

I have no idea how accurate PCems hardware emulation is,what the "auxiliary device" is, or why these drives can't be set (may all be a red-herring - but it's interesting)

hi thats very interesting to know that ill give pcem a try as well thanks for letting me know

Btw, just because you've been using "cards" for drives and your controller only does autodetect.

I got the adapter shows below delivered today ... it's for a CF card (which inherently looks like and IDE drive - the adapter is really just connections between the CF socket and the IDE cable)

I put it in, and it *mostly* worked right - I was able to install DOS on it and it boots, passes CHKDSK etc.

The reason I say *mostly* - there was one odd thing... I put it a 32m CF card - the system is a P4 and it's BIOS recognizes the card and shows the main hard drive as "32M Compact Flash"

DOS FDISK was able to see it - but for some reason FDISK thought there was 60m of free space, which I didn't notice at first and has just told it to "use maximum available size".
And then ... while formatting, it proceeded perfectly to about the 30m mark - then just tried to constantly "recover" bad sectors!

I deleted that partition and made a 30m one - that formatted and works/boots with no problems. Fdisk still says there's 30m free space on the "disk", but I know it's not real and have no plans to try and use it - long story short, it seems at least this setup (with 32m card) didn't present exactly like a 32m drive!

This may (is likely) not be related to some of the problems you've been having, but it might be worthwhile to check that the drive size detected is actually the size of the card.