VOGONS


First post, by tensi0n

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Hello all,

I've been building a 486Dx2 machine using a 4gb CF card for my HDD. I've been able to format the CF card and sort of install MS-dos. When installing dos I get rear/write errors and I have to "retry" to get the installation to continue. It eventually completes but everything runs slow and buggy. I've tried several utilities, clearhdd, EZ-drive, fdisk, and I have not been very successful. I feel like it is a problem with the controlled card I'm using and/or the version of the bios. I'm not sure exactly who makes my controller card or how to set the jumpers. I've left them as they were since I've pulled the card from a 386 machine. Any ideas? Thank you.

I attached a photo of the MB, controller, and CF card I'm using.

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Reply 1 of 14, by tensi0n

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Update: I found the make/model of my controller.

GOLDSTAR ELECTRONICS INTERNATIONAL, INC.

Model: IODE-3290U

https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy … -IDE-AT-30.html

Reply 2 of 14, by SW-SSG

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That I/O card was made in 1991, based on the various date codes on the ICs. I imagine it's just that it can't handle >540MB drives very well.

EDIT: I stand corrected; see the other replies.

Last edited by SW-SSG on 2019-03-03, 05:45. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 4 of 14, by treeman

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you will need to fdisk that hdd to 504mb, make primary and format. Otherwise your IO card will only see the first 504mb from the 2gb leaving alot of sector write errors

Reply 5 of 14, by The Serpent Rider

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That's most likely mobo BIOS problem and I/O card without BIOS has nothing to do with it.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 6 of 14, by treeman

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I actually had this one before,. bios can see 2gb so it boots but the card is limited to the 504mb and that amount of cylinders so if it tries to write or read to anything past the 504mb you get seek write errors, either way you need to make and smaller partition to fix this, for a dx2 its the right time frame. What you can do is have a few different cf cards with the same dos/windows install but different games content

Reply 7 of 14, by rasz_pl

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https://web.archive.org/web/20180621003647/ht … izeMB504-c.html
100% bios limitation, has ZERO to do with IO controller

btw wow, pcguide.com got turned into spam linkfarm in last 10 days. I actually read it on February 15 and it was still serving proper PC knowledge bible, Google cache from Feb 20 still remembers it fine, but today on feb 25 its a spam farm 🙁

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction

Reply 9 of 14, by tensi0n

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Thanks for the responses. So should I adjusted the sectors and heads in the bios to reflect 504mb and also fdisk or will the bios settings be enough?

Reply 10 of 14, by treeman

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No you definitely need to delete all partitions with fdisk, create a primary dos partition with fdisk 504mb. Very important make it active or it won't boot.
After you do this fdisk will reboot the pc, after reboot (assuming you are booting from floppy) c: will be there but unformatted, you will need to format it in dos.

Leave the bios as is for now, if it formats 504mb with no errors it will be ok, if you get errors yes you will need to manually enter the heads and cylinders for 504mb

Reply 12 of 14, by treeman

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yeah good luck, btw how are you booting to fdisk this drive? floppy drive and have the cf card as primary drive in bios? because if its a secondary hard drive you won't be able to make it active through fdisk something once i wasted a bit of time figuring out. My solution was to plug the cr card to a pc over usb, run virtual machine with dos6 and mount my cf card as a primary hard drive and a bootable dos6 disk img file as the floppy drive

Reply 13 of 14, by tensi0n

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I have it set as my primary drive and booting to it using MS-Dos 6.22 install disk. I used toe fdisk utility on it. I was able to get it all working and I did have to set the cylinders and heads in the bios to cut out the errors I was having. I am having a new issue though and I'm not sure why. I installed a few games to test out performance and Doom runs terrible! It is very laggy and slows down to almost a crawl when more bad guys and what not come into the frame. I tried wolfenstein 3d and monkey island and those work great. I even tried disabling my SB 16 and that didn't do anything. I also tried not loading anything and just running doom and same results. I'm running 16MB of ram. I posted the problem on the software board: Doom runs slow on 486Dx2 machine

Reply 14 of 14, by treeman

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yeah that sounds like the perfect way to do it then, hard to say if the 2 issues are related, have you run any benchmarks to see overall system performance cpu speed? maybye your l2 cache is disabled but 1 thing at a time get the cf card done properly then try again