System hangs while booting DOS off floppy - only when HDD is present \ VOGONS

System hangs while booting DOS off floppy - only when HDD is present

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First post, by nzoomed

Posted on 2020-08-05, 02:09

nzoomed Offline

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Using brand new floppy disk and drive.

Boots into DOS fine if there is no HDD installed.

but as soon as I try booting off the floppy with the drive installed, it hangs with a white flashing cursor.

Any ideas?
I've tried different IO cards and drives with no difference in results.

Last edited by Stiletto on 2020-08-11, 02:34. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 5, by Warlord

Posted on 2020-08-05, 02:14

Warlord Offline

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change the ide ribbon cable for the ide drive? Try a different hard drive. Either way sounds like faulty hardware.

Reply 2 of 5, by nzoomed

Posted on 2020-08-05, 06:11

nzoomed Offline

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This is a strange one.
I swapped out the RAM with a different set of SIMM Memory and it works fine!
All this time I was thinking it was a faulty drive or something else at fault.

Weird thing is i was running Memtest86 all day on it and it passed!
Perhaps some sort of incompatibility problem?

Reply 3 of 5, by Socket3

Posted on 2020-08-06, 13:14

Socket3 Offline

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nzoomed wrote on 2020-08-05, 06:11:
This is a strange one. I swapped out the RAM with a different set of SIMM Memory and it works fine! All this time I was thinking […]
Show full quote

This is a strange one.
I swapped out the RAM with a different set of SIMM Memory and it works fine!
All this time I was thinking it was a faulty drive or something else at fault.

Weird thing is i was running Memtest86 all day on it and it passed!
Perhaps some sort of incompatibility problem?

Some of my SiS based 486 motherboards do this when I use EDO SIMMs and forget to select "EDO DRAM installed" from bios.

Reply 4 of 5, by nzoomed

Posted on 2020-08-07, 00:21

nzoomed Offline

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Socket3 wrote on 2020-08-06, 13:14:

nzoomed wrote on 2020-08-05, 06:11:
This is a strange one. I swapped out the RAM with a different set of SIMM Memory and it works fine! All this time I was thinking […]
Show full quote

This is a strange one.
I swapped out the RAM with a different set of SIMM Memory and it works fine!
All this time I was thinking it was a faulty drive or something else at fault.

Weird thing is i was running Memtest86 all day on it and it passed!
Perhaps some sort of incompatibility problem?

Some of my SiS based 486 motherboards do this when I use EDO SIMMs and forget to select "EDO DRAM installed" from bios.

I think this board predates EDO memory, being a 386, but have been told that 3 chip simm memory quite often is probelatic.
If parity was enabled it also would crash. Seems to be fine with parity with these other simms, but will still need to do a memtest.

Reply 5 of 5, by MAZter

Posted on 2020-08-07, 04:16

MAZter Offline

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If it's large hdd, try to boot from WD EZ-Drive floppy

Doom is what you want (c) MAZter

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