First post, by Maxxarcade
I'm working on an old Compaq Presario 850 that has a Pentium Overdrive installed. The issue was large drive support not working, since the system has a 1993 BIOS. I found out about XT-IDE, and decided to try it this past weekend.
I was able to program a 28C64 with the XT-IDE bios version 2.0.0.3 beta 3 (8KB AT file) and put it on an old 3Com network card. It will show up during boot and detect the drive, but Windows 98 FDISK still identifies any drive as no larger than 503MB. The odd thing is that FDISK notifies me that the drive is large, and asks me if I want to enable support for it. Without XT-IDE, it doesn't prompt me to enable large disk support.
I tried a newer version of XT-IDE that was from 2015, and for some reason it doesn't sense the keyboard input to boot from drive A or C, but it will detect if I press the key for serial or ROM boot. When it goes to boot, the computer gives a beep and message about a partition table error and halts.
Also, the XT-IDE auto-configure function in the setup program says that no controllers are detected. I ended up just programming the image without running the configuration. The system only has 1 IDE controller onboard, and I'm not sure whether it is VLB or ISA based.
What is the latest confirmed working version of XT-IDE? And I'm curious if anyone else has gotten it working on an old Compaq. The BIOS on these is not very forgiving, and there doesn't seem to be any way to disable hard drive auto detection. For example if I manually set it to Type 1, it will just set itself back to Type 65 on the next reboot. Telling it to Ignore Changes makes no difference.