I run the retail version of DiskManager 9.57 and it works fine for my machines...
My IBM 386sx machine works with a 20GB HDD now, a 486DX also has a 20GB one and even my GoldenGate486 setup installed in an Amiga4000 used to work with a 20GB HDD (yep, got lots of 20gb drives 🤣)

I see that you ask about 286 machines... can't really comment on that, I don't own one 🤐

Hi Megatron,

Thanks for the post, you inspired me to go and investigate the XTIDE project to get a decent hard drive running on my A2286 bridgeboard on my Amiga 2000.

This is by far the best way to get old 286/386 class machines a hard drive greater than 528MB running on them (without spending a fortune on a controller card with a built-in bios as you mentioned). Also a lot of those BIOSes do not have a custom/autodetect feature, they are limited to the 47 pre-defined hard drives that are near impossible to find these days. My A2286 has exactly this problem, so if I put in an HDD that wasn't listed, the PC would not allow anything to be written to it, including the Drive Overlay Software I tried.

I do have a Future Domain SCSI controller that I was using in the beginning, but the Amiga 2000 only has 4 ISA slots, one of which is occupied by the bridgeboard. The main reason for me using the bridgeboard is to use a cheap NE2000 clone network card to connect the Amiga to network to transfer files. The bridgeboard/NE2000 combination was a lot cheaper than a dedicated Amiga network card, as well as being a cool project to have to get them working properly. The next ISA slot was occupied by the VGA card and the last by the IDE/RS232/Parallel Multi I/O card.

To really complicate things, I wanted a soundcard in there as well, however all the ISA slots were occupied now. The majority of soundcards have an IDE port on them, but most of them can only be set to Secondary or Tertiary, very few can be Primary. I found a Turtle Beach Tropez soundcard on EBay that allows the IDE port to be set to Primary or Secondary, so problem solved.....or so I thought. For some bizarre reason, if I set the port to Primary and connect a hard drive, the floppy drive ceased to function properly. There were definitely no I/O or interrupt conflicts as it was set to 1F0h and INT 14, exactly the same as my Multi IO card. If I took out the soundcard and put my Multi IO card back in, the floppy would work 100% again. To cut a long story short, I could never get the soundcard set to Primary to work on this setup. (It worked perfectly on my Pentium PC as Primary)

In the end, even if I did get the soundcard working properly, I still needed to overcome the fact that I did not have a hard drive that the A2286 could recognise properly. When I saw your post about the XTIDE project I got very excited again and immediately went to their website to check it out. That BIOS was EXACTLY what I was looking for, not only did it have an autodetect feature, it also allows you to boot off any IDE channel, as well as master and slave devices. This got me thinking that I could use almost any soundcard with an IDE port on it, even if it was set to Secondary or Tertiary. For now, I'd "keep it simple, stupid" and used the IDE controller on the Multi I/O card as it was set to Primary.

The problem now was how I was going to get the XTIDE BIOS in my A2286. Fortunately most network cards have a Boot ROM socket on them, so I set about figuring out how I can get the XTIDE BIOS working in the Boot ROM socket of my NE2000 card. I downloaded the file from the website http://code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/d … BIOS_v1.1.5.zip an saw that I'd need to program it into a 27C64 EPROM chip. Fortunately I had a few of these lying around as well as a Willem EPROM programmer that I bought cheaply off EBay a couple of years ago.

I immediately programmed ide_at.bin into one of the 27C64s and plugged it into my network card. I switched on the Amiga and waited for baited breath to see the boot selection menu come up on the PC. Unfortunately no go 🙁 I realised that the network card probably had the boot ROM disabled, so I loaded up the nework card config program and sure enough, it was disabled. I set the the boot ROM to enabled and to a size of 8K, at address DC00h. I rebooted the Amiga expecting it to read the rom this time, unfortunately still no go.

Upon reading some of the topics on the XTIDE forum, I realised that the ROM image did not have the checksum byte at the end of the file set. A PC will not load a boot rom if it does not have a checksum byte. In the downloaded ZIP file, there is a utility called idecfg.com. This is another brilliant little touch by the guys who developed the whole XTIDE project. You can custom configure your ROM to exactly how you want it. The important setting in this utility is to ensure that the generate checksum is set to yes. You will probably have to change a setting in one of the other menus and the change it back again in order for the generate checksum to activate. When you exit idecfg.com, it'll ask you if you want to save the changes, just say yes.

I then programmed this ROM and fired up the Amiga. WHOOHOO!!!.... Almost!... The XTBIOS showed up in the boot process but froze the system before it got to detecting the hard drive. Took a while to figure this one out, but read on the Bridgeboard FAQ on Aminet that the A2286 uses adresses D000h to DFFFh to communicate with the Amiga side and I had set the Boot ROM address to DC00. I loaded up the network card config program again and set the Boot ROM address to CC00h.

I switched on the Amiga and this time....Perfect!!! The XTIDE bios detected my hard drive as a Primary at address 1F0h. I FDISK'd it and installed MS-DOS 6.22 without a problem.

😁

Now it was time to see if I could get the hard drive to boot off the Secondary controller on my SB16 non-PNP soundcard. I set the jumpers on the SB16 for the IDE port to 170h and INT 15 (standard Secondary settings), replaced the Multi I/O card with the SB16 and plugged in the hard drive. YES!!! The XTIDE BIOS detected it perfectly on the Secondary channel and booted without a hitch! I was a very happy man at this moment!

The standard settings for the XTIDE BIOS is to check every available IDE channel and bring up a boot menu to select which device you's like to boot from (including the floppy drive). This makes it very flexible, but it does take a long time to boot the machine. The idecfg.com program allows you to customise the XTIDE BIOS to however you want it, brilliant! So I removed a lot of the extra features and set it to detect only one channel, at address 170h and boot from there. I reprogrammed the 27C64 and plugged it back into the network card. Boot time was now in a matter of seconds.

This all took place over about 2 weeks, trying many different things not mentioned here, I only mentioned the things of significance. But now, I'm a very happy man! I can use the network card to transfer data from my main PC to the Amiga, boot the hard drive off the SB16 IDE port and have sound on the A2286 for playing games like Prince of Persia etc. 😀

I know this was a long winded article, so I'll summarise:

Disclaimer: You do this entirely at your own risk, I accept no responsibility should something go wrong and data is lost or hardware is damaged.

Items needed:

ISA network card with a boot rom socket (Probably the best option as they're readily available and cheap)
27C64 EEPROM
EEPROM Programmer or someone who can program the EEPROM for you.
XTIDE BIOS files
code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/do ... .5.zip[url]
IDE interface card, either a Multi I/O card or a soundcard with an IDE interface on it.

Run the configuration program for your network card. Set the interrupt and adress to something that won't conflict with any other cards in your system, Address 300h and interrupt 10 are usually good choices. Set the Boot ROM to enabled, 8K in size and address CC00h (you might need to changed this as it does depend on any other cards in your system that might use the same address space)

NB: The following program does not work on 64-bit versions of Windows

Extract the files from the XTIDE BIOS zip and run idecfg.com. Select "Load BIOS from file" and select ide_at.bin. Select "Configure XTIDE Universal Bios" Select "Late initialisation" and change it to N. Select "Late initialisation" again and change it to Y. Select "Back to previous menu" and then select "Flash EEPROM" Ensure that the "Generate Checksum byte" is set to Y. Select "Back to previous Menu" and then "Exit to DOS" It will now ask you if you want to save the BIOS and say Yes.

Program the new ide_at.bin into the 27C64 EEPROM. Plug the EEPROM into the network card boot rom socket. Make sure that the EEPROM is plugged in the correct way, there is a little half-moon notch on the side of the EEPROM. Make sure this is on the same side as the half-moon notch on the boot rom socket.

Plug the network card into the PC and attached the hard drive to your IDE controller. Switch on your PC and hopefully it'll bring up the XTIDE boot menu. You might need to enter the PC bios and set your hard drives to "NONE" or "Disabled" for the XTIDE bios to work. If it still doesn't work, try a different address in your network card setup program, set the boot ROM to CE00h or DC00h until you find a value that works. Try change another option in the idecfg.com program to something and change it back again to ensure that the Checksum Byte is saved.

If you are adventurous, you can customise your bios using the idecfg.com program, but you must know what you're doing as the XTBIOS will likely not work if something is changed that isn't correct.

Aha, so you found my post on Vintage-computer.com? I struggled for a while until someone figured out the bios didn't have a checksum byte at the end!

My experience with the XTIDE BIOS has been mixed - the CF cards I used were not 100% reliable with it - occaisional utilities (Norton sysinfo, the c't disk info tool and directory listings would lock up. However, the modern WDC Scorpio Blue drive I'm using now is rock solid (and extremely fast for a 286 based host - getting on for 3mbytes/sec!). I couldn't be happier!

There still exists a limitation of 8Gb, but that's more than I would ever need with every single 286-compatible game ever!

Yup, I did and thanks again, it was quite a struggle getting it working, but now it's 100%

I haven't tried with a CF card yet, I have a Transcend 4GB CF card in my Amiga 1200 which works great, but I don't want to format it on the A2286 and lose my data.

I'll buy a 8GB CF card tomorrow and try it out. Currently I'm running a 4.3GB Seagate HDD on the A2286, which as you say, is waaaay more than I'll ever need on a 286! Haven't tried speed tests yet, but I'll get some results and post them, hopefully a good comparison between the CF card and the HDD.

Got hold of a couple Transcend 8GB 133X CF cards this weekend, same as yours. Also having the same issues with a few utilities, Norton Sysinfo does not recognise the CF card when I want to benchmark it. Norton does however see the partitions, report back the correct size of the partitions etc. However, I have the exactly the same problem with my Seagate ST34311A 4.3GB HDD.

The one HDD benchmark program freezes the system as soon as it tries to detect the CF card, works perfectly with the HDD. Other than those 2 programs, everything else seems to work perfectly with the CF card. All my games and the programs to communicate with the Amiga side work perfectly.

Now for the benchmarking. My A2286 bridgeboard is an 8MHz 286 board with the Soundblaster IDE port as the HDD controller. It's definitely not a DMA controller, operates in PIO mode 0 only.

CF card: 900KB/sec read and write (sequential and random), 1.5ms access time. Not great performance at all, was expecting it to be able to saturate the controller, at least 2MB/sec or better. When I connect it to my main PC, Core2 Quad 2.8GHz, I get around 18 -20MB/sec sequential reads, obviously this is in UDMA mode. Perhaps PIO mode 0 of the CF card is not well optimised.

Seagate HDD: Got around 2MB/sec sequential read and write, about 1.5MB/sec random read and write, 12ms access time. Much better performance than the CF card.

The poor performance of the CF card is not really an issue for me, far more importantly is that it uses very little power and thus generates very little heat as well as being very small physically. My Amiga A2000 is jam packed with expansion cards and the Amiga side uses a 9.1GB SCSI HDD which generates a lot of heat. There's no space to add in extra cooling fans or extra hard drives, so I'm gonna replace the PC HDD with the CF card permanently.

I'll keep you posted with any other developments, incompatibities etc.

Thanks for the update - it does seem somewhat similar to my results.

Unfortunately I'm likely to put the 286 into storage as the upgrade plan with the IBM 486SLC2 module didn't work out and I only have the one AT-class case, which I'm going to re-use for a 486 instead.

Still, if I pick up another case at some point, I know I've got a system that I can use modern drives on.

...

thanks for digging up this thread
in this picture, this guy's 286 bios recognizes a 1gb CF-IDE drive, which option did he take?

I got it wrong, sorry. So here again:

@orcish75
1. You used a PC-Network-Card in an ISA-Slot and put the XTIDE-Bios-Rom on it, so you are able to boot certain IDE-Drivers e.g. a CF-Card connected to a SB-Card with a real IDE-Port (not a cdrom-only port)

2. What do you think about booting (io.sys, msdos.sys and command.com) from a Hardfile and then switching to a CF-Card connected to SB-CT2950 ?

You wrote that it was not possible to access the CF-card without the XT-IDE Bios/Rom on your Network-Card.
I thought about this:

- Booting Dos from Hardfile
- Loading uide.sys (freedos) or drivepro to get acess to the CF-card and using DiskManager oder drivePro in order not to be limited bei the IDE-Harddrives with the Bioa of the A2286

Doc

Hi dr.zeissler,

1. Yup, that's exactly what I did. It only works with certain soundcard IDE ports. Most soundcards that are non-PNP and have jumpers to set the IDE interface should work. If you need to load a driver to initialise the IDE port then it won't work. The cards that I have tried that worked are the Turtle Beach Tropez 32, Aztech Sound Galaxy Pro II (I38-MMSN845), SB16 CT2910 and a generic ESS688 non-PNP card. The cards I've tried that don't work are the SB16 CT2950, OPTi 82c929, OPTi 82c931, Yamaha YMF-71x. The CT2950 might work in a machine with a PNP BIOS, but my A2286 doesn't have that so it has to be initialised by software before it can be used.

2. Good idea! For some reason, I just couldn't get a hardfile setup working on my A2000. The PC side could never find the hardfile I created on the Amiga HDD, so getting a CF card or HDD booting on the PC side was my only option. If I remember correctly, I think it was due to me using PFS3 as my Amiga filesystem, the hardfile has to be on an FFS partition. If you can get the hardfile working, then I'm sure your idea of loading any PNP initalisation software and uide.sys or drivepro will get the CF or HDD recognised. I haven't tried uide.sys on any of my DOS PC's, does it allow HDD's to be recognised in DOS without the BIOS or is it an IDE CD-ROM driver?

Cheers!

Argh, I didn't get it, but why?

I boot a from a small Hardfile (2MB). I put a ct2910 in the A2000 and configured IDE IRQ15 and IDE-Secondary.
The A2286 Bios is still Harddrive: NONE / NONE.

When I start the Ontrack DiskManager 9.57 from floppy two drives were detected!

One is the Hardfile and the Second is the CF-Card that is connected with the CT2910.
I can access the cf-card within the started Ontrack-Diskmanager, but the driver is not installed (ontrackd.sys)
because the Diskmanager says that there is no driver required, but that's wrong 🙁

Seems like there is no way of booting a small hardfile and using a cf-card connected to a soundcard for the bigger and much faster data?

Doc

It could be that the CT2910's IDE port does not use the standard ports for primary/secondary IDE channels the BIOS is expecting. You might need something like XTIDE's option ROM to access it.

But I get access to it with the startet diskmanager. I think the only missing thing at startup is the ontrackd.sys driver with the proper options,
but it fails to install.

AFAIK the disk manager access the disk directly, not relying on BIOS. ODDs are meant to replace the BIOS functions with their own, so if it installed correctly your setup would likely work. Adding a XT-IDE BIOS with an old ISA NIC would likely solve those issues as well and make ODDs unnecessary.

Here are my actual thought abouts this. (PC Side of an Amiga2000 with A2286/8/1 Bridgeboard)

- what are the advantages of not using "ontrack" or another solution for the HDD of the PC-Side the Amiga ?

more space? NO
more bootable os-partitions? Yes, but with 286/8/1MB you will not get OS/2 V1x working...so in short having a real scsi or seperate IDE (cache) controller working does not give any real benefits because of the limitations the cpu and ram gives us.

so what about XTIDE combined with RAM expansion? Yes this would make sense to me, but I have only seen that on XT-class machines to fillup the 512KB to 640KB...so useless for the A2286.

I thought about getting out my network card to place a ram expansion with I/O controller in that A2000 but there was no way of getting the right ressources to get LPT2 working for filetransfer and or soundsolutions like OPL2/3LPT, zipdrive or laplink. so I dropped that and went back to network-card. the only thing I can optimize actully are putting an XTIDE Bios in my ethernetcard and get rid of the ontrack diskmanger, but as I wrote above for what? without a ram-expansion I do not see any benefit for this.

My ET4000 in that config is really good, the diamond-card has a nice and clean output on the tft, but it has also some problems with scrolling in very early EGA games, in most games this can be fixed with "svga compatibility" but there are still ega-games that are hard-coded to EGA features that don't work like "BeverlyHillsCop". And all ET4000 cards tend to 3-4mm to the right when using 256color lowres modes. textmode vga, ega-modes, vga-16colors are all centered though.

I am thinking of switching to another gfx-solution, e.g. another ISA vga-card...but not all are compatible to the bridgeboard and mostly the image quality is very bad with lot's of vertical lines on the tft.

Doc