Imperious wrote:XT PC's do not have a bios that can be entered and altered like newer pc's. Everything must be configured by hardware jumpers or software.
In order to use that 40MB HDD you need an MFM controller card."
Yep, only very exotic Turbo XT's like Juko XT maybe had a BIOS "CMOS Setup Utility Program" (jeez, what a long name!) 😁
Setting up a MFM drive isn't that diffcult. It just needs a bit of time and patience.. So don't rush it.
Things to consider :
- be careful to use the correct encoding (MFM vs RLL)
- interleave factor (find the sweetspot, spinrite may help)
- tell the controller about bad sectors (check table on HDD label)
- use the right landing zone for the parking program
- don't forget the low-level formatting
Oh, and here's a little tip:
Use FDISK/Format from DOS 3.x to ensure the disk is correctly formatted (fine for MFM disks upto ~30MB).
These older versions work on a head/cylinder basis and don't exceed the disks capacity.
Maybe Compaq DOS 3.31 is the most modern version here, don't know.
(Note: Some OEM versions used different sector sizes not compatible with normal versions of MS-DOS).
In theory, programs from DOS 6.2x should also work just fine, but I had a few issues with them:
They allocated more disk space than was available. 1MB too much, to be exactly.
I had a 20MB disk and Fdisk created a 20MB partition which Format was unable to format.
After I changed partition size to 19MB, Format finished formatting without any complaints.
I can only speculate as to why it is like this, but I guess the older drives either need a bit of
extra space to be left untouched or the newer utilities align their partitions in a different way.
Another difference is that DOS 3.x used FAT16 and DOS 6.x uses FAT16B (whenever it is able to).
Anyway, I don't want to start a discussion about this now.
I only mentioned it in case someone encounters the same trouble as me.
More information about this can be found on Wikipeetia the misspelled encyclopedia. 😉
http://www.wikipeetia.org/File_Alocation_Table
I hope this helps a bit.
Please keep in mind that I'm no XT expert myself. so better double check everything I said. 😉
Imperious wrote:
Another thing to keep in mind is that the XT bios does not support IDE by default, but needs bios rom extensions for that and some other devices like 1.44MB floppy drives.
A 1.44mb floppy drive will work, but only for 720k.
That's true. For 1.44Mb/1.2MB floppiy drives he needs a socalled "high-speed" floppy controller. Sometimes not even 720KB drives work properly on XTs.
They' are sometimes misdetected as 360KB drives and you have to setup a device driver (driver.sys) or use the drivparm variable (not driveparm!)
Note that drivparm wasn't working in PC DOS 3.x without a patch or a trick. More about this can be read here:
http://www.uncreativelabs.net/textfiles/dos/BDRIVE.TXT
http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/oldcomps … s/DOS-undoc.txt
http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/driver.sys.htm
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