What's it do if you disable the HD?

Ah, forgot to say that it boots fine from floppy if I disable the HDD.

Have you tried to enable HDD and disconnect the ribbon cable?

brostenen wrote:

Have you tried to enable HDD and disconnect the ribbon cable?

That will usually cause a long hang and a failure message.

Is the hard drive formatted or could it have an old boot sector on it?

Otherwise 19 GB might just be too big

smeezekitty wrote:

That will usually cause a long hang and a failure message. […]
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brostenen wrote:

Have you tried to enable HDD and disconnect the ribbon cable?

That will usually cause a long hang and a failure message.

Is the hard drive formatted or could it have an old boot sector on it?

Otherwise 19 GB might just be too big

I was just thinking that it could be the cable is defect or the harddrive is defect.

Enter manual settings 1023 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sector and see if it continues. Is the drive empty?

To be honest I'm not sure if the cable actually works or what is on the drive. Will try another cable tonight.

@philscomputerlab, thanks I'll give that a go and report back.

Alright, some progress yesterday.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Enter manual settings 1023 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sector and see if it continues. Is the drive empty?

After I tried this, I started getting "Primary HDC failure", very strange.

Also tried a brand new cable etc, but no luck there either. I rummaged in my drawer and found a PCI disk controller with two SATA connectors and one IDE. So I tried connecting the HDD to that, and finally started having some progress. Disabled the HDD in the AMI BIOS. The VIA BIOS on the card found my hard drive, and I could boot from a DOS floppy and run FDISK on the drive. Then I could also connect the CD-ROM, which I ended up connecting to the builtin IDE as primary master, and started installing DOS and stuff.

So this works OK now, but also have some drawbacks:

* I lose the IDE activity LED
* The controller takes a while to find the HDD at startup, so a delay by 30 seconds or so.

Well, theoretically 486 MBs BIOS must support extended Int13h (or Large) and up to 7.44 GB HDDs (255 heads, 1023 cylinders, 63 sectors). 19 GB is too many...
AFAIR 28-bit LBA support (and HDDs up to 137 GB) are added later, around 1996...

pojo wrote:

So this works OK now, but also have some drawbacks:

* I lose the IDE activity LED
* The controller takes a while to find the HDD at startup, so a delay by 30 seconds or so.

At least you're making progress!

And you can boot from it as well?

Weird that the manual setting threw an error. Do you have a really small drive, or maybe a small Compact Flash card and CF to IDE adapter to check if the controller works?

Or without the HDD, just a boot Floppy and CD-ROM driver, will a CD-ROM drive work?

In general I recommend mucking around with the HDD on it's own, nothing else connected, no CD-ROM and no secondary channel.

You could try using DDO software, set the HDD type to none and it will take care of the settings. There are lots to choose from. I'm in the process of testing a few so happy to help out. I just recently tested the WD edition of EZ-Drive / EZ-BIOS: http://youtu.be/8LzCB6kDVC8

pojo wrote:

Alright, some progress yesterday. […]
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Alright, some progress yesterday.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Enter manual settings 1023 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sector and see if it continues. Is the drive empty?

After I tried this, I started getting "Primary HDC failure", very strange.

Also tried a brand new cable etc, but no luck there either. I rummaged in my drawer and found a PCI disk controller with two SATA connectors and one IDE. So I tried connecting the HDD to that, and finally started having some progress. Disabled the HDD in the AMI BIOS. The VIA BIOS on the card found my hard drive, and I could boot from a DOS floppy and run FDISK on the drive. Then I could also connect the CD-ROM, which I ended up connecting to the builtin IDE as primary master, and started installing DOS and stuff.

So this works OK now, but also have some drawbacks:

* I lose the IDE activity LED
* The controller takes a while to find the HDD at startup, so a delay by 30 seconds or so.

Sounds like the same issue, that I have with my P-133 machine. The onboard controller does simply not work with larger drives.
And in some cases, the controller just goes totally unstable. Well its sort of a "unstable/not working/working fine" mysterie.
The sollution that I did, was to use a PCI-ATA100 controller (those SIL-XXX) and it is working 100% fine this way.
For the activity-led, I have used the one, wich is on the controller it self. You might have that on your's as well.

Getting back to you'r machine now....

So, it was not the cable. Hmmm... Then it might be as one here described. That the controller does not support "large" HDD's.
Might be a unstable controller. And it might just be that the controller is dead.
This is not any loss at all. As drives are one of the first thing to go, and that's why people are exploiting other type of storage.
One of the only thing in a retro machine, wich really not need to be retro.
Well.... Except for those HDD-less systems, like Amiga-500. (Drivesounds was part of the experience)
Try the ATA controller for a couple of weeks, and then go searching to see if you can come up with a better sollution for the 486.

You could see if the controller itself has any connectors for the front LED, or if it has LEDs on the board itself.

Also, some boards have setup utilites on their option ROM (like RAID cards), perhaps your IDE controller also has one like this, which might allow you to input the HDDs parameters mannually, therefore speeding up the boot times.

As alexanrs said, look for LED connectors on the PCI controller to plug-in the IDE LED cable. Here are two examples:

The boot delay is caused by the controller looking for other IDE/SATA devices. See if there is a keyboard combination you can use during bootup to enter the controller BIOS and disable the connectors not used (not all controllers have this option, so you may have to just live with the delay).

Does that SIL IDE PCI controller support DMA in Windows 9x?

philscomputerlab wrote:

Does that SIL IDE PCI controller support DMA in Windows 9x?

I believe the answer is yes.

Here's a quote from the SiI 0680 ATA/133 Controller readme file:

------- B) Note ------- In most cases, the controller is tuned to highest transfer mode that is supported by the connected devic […]
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-------
B) Note
-------
In most cases, the controller is tuned to highest transfer mode that is supported
by the connected devices. If a user wishes to change this default setting, it can
be done through Silicon Configuration Utility(SiIcfg).

Lots of helpful answers, thanks for that 😀

I'm not sure of the exact model of my PCI controller, but I'll have a close look and see if I can find a LED header on there.

I mucked around a bit yesterday and also tested a 2.5" 320GB SATA drive just for fun. I could install MS-DOS on it, but the computer rebooted immediately every time when it started reading the C: drive. I could read/write it just fine from a DOS floppy though. Anyway, I went back to the IDE drive which still works.

A strange detail I found was that the PCI controller found the SATA drive much quicker than the IDE one. Alas, I can't do *anything* in the VIA BIOS of the controller. I think it is just meant for RAID array setup:

I've ordered a Compact Flash adapter and I will try a 2GB or 4GB card with the onboard IDE controller then and see if I have more luck. 😀

You did check the jumpers right? Some WD drives have a capacity limit jumper too. Worth checking the data sheet online.

philscomputerlab wrote:

You did check the jumpers right? Some WD drives have a capacity limit jumper too. Worth checking the data sheet online.

Check jumpers on the motherboard? Not yet 😀

The card doesn't have a LED header. But I wonder, is it possible just to solder a header to the IDE? Pin 39 is a LED driver, but I wonder if it's 5V or 3.3V.

http://pinoutsguide.com/HD/Ata44Internal_pinout.shtml

Sorry I meant jumpers on the drive.