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XTIDE tech support thread

Interesting problem.
Yes, the card should be interchangeable between a modern system and your 8 bit machine. The fact that you were able to prep the drive and actually boot it on your XT clone demonstrates this.

There is definitely something wrong with writes though. Was edit the only thing you used to corrupt the drive? Do you have a virus? Does just booting the drive eventually corrupt it? Can you write data with other things? (ie, copy a file from A: perhaps and see if that corrupts it) There's lots of things that you may have to do to help get the actual fault narrowed down and report back.

If you want to do a stress test on the card itself, you can switch to the bios v11 and run the xt hell test on it.
http://www.wiki.vintage-computer.com/index.php/XTIDE_project

read the documentation to see what it does (it will destroy all data on the drive) but it should bring out any flaws in the hardware itself to help eliminate that variable.
 
Power supply is a substantially newer baby AT unit. Has never given issues before, is last suspect here (to me) because of that.

I cannot do anything floppy-based on the same motherboard, CPU, and RAM (because I don't have a high density floppy controller). Anything not running from the drive attached to the card itself will involve putting the card in a Pentium-class computer which kind of hurts troubleshooting efforts (as the environment is completely different). Will do it, though, as it can eliminate the card if no problems happen on another machine...right?
 
It is possible that your problems are related to incompatible address translations.

Just put the XTIDE in Pentium and try to get it working in there. Debugging with XT would be too hard without floppy drive available.

Once the XTIDE is in Pentium, connect some drive to XTIDE card. Remove any existing partitions and do a fresh DOS install. If everything works, then the problem is not with XTIDE card. If you have same kinds of write problems, then something must be wrong with XTIDE or maybe just the drive is not compatible with XTIDE.
 
At this point I believe it's this specific drive (IBM DARA-212000, TravelStar 12GB 2.5") which simply is incompatible. The symptoms are the same (actually, worse) on the Pentium system where the card is working flawlessly with other drives.

I have two of this TravelStar drive and will verify that they both show bad symptoms so you guys can document this drive being incompatible.

Edit: confirming that the second DARA-212000 does not play nice with the card. Other drives are working fine so I'm presuming my card is fine, sorry to have been a bother.
 
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Hello all. I just built a brand new card and I'm trying to get it to work. I took great care in soldering and checking my connections but I'm not having luck yet. I have pictures and a video of boot behavior at the following link.

http://greenrenovation.wordpress.com/x-ibm-5150-pc/

I have a high quality soldering station and mis-spent a few college summers building circuit boards for military lasers. The switches and jumpers are set per the directions. The jumper on the Seagate hard drive is set to “master or single drive”. I also tried “cable select” but it made no difference. I removed the added memory card so the only cards installed are for the XTIDE, floppy, and monochrome monitor. Perhaps I need to reflash the bios on the XTIDE, but I’m not sure exactly how to do this yet.

Thanks to everyone involved - this has been a fun project and I'm sure I'll get it to work.

John Sellers
 
You might actually be ok there. It is clearly executing the BIOS off the eeprom. I can't see if it IDed the drive, but at least 1/2 of the card is working if you can see something at power up.

The eeprom was pre-programmed with an early prototype of the bios, and i think there were some CGA screen incompatibilities.
your next step should be to boot to a floppy and run idecfg.exe and flash in the newest version of the BIOS. (see the wiki page; see page #1 of this thread)

The next step is critical though. Your eeprom is suspect until you can successfully flash it and enable software data protect on it. THose are all defaults in the idecfg program, so you really just load the file and select start flashing. If it works, you should be done. If it doesn't work (eeprom data verify failure) then I will have to mail you a new eeprom to replace the POS samsung parts.
 
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The only way I can boot to floppy is to remove the XTIDE card. Otherwise I get the exact same bad behavior either with or without a floppy inserted. By the way, the CGA card is not installed - I'm using monochrome.

John

edit: I did not know that installing the XTIDE card always caused the PC to boot to the XTIDE BIOS menu. I discovered later that my card needed to be flashed to the latest BIOS. The older BIOS was not compatible with my monochrome display and caused the BIOS menu to display gibberish. I also did not know that hitting "ctrl" during post would allow me to access the floppy drive.
 
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There are multiple problems going on here, but all of them are very fixable.
Problem #1: you have newer operating systems on your hard drives that likely won't boot on an 8088. I suspect that your machine is locking up as soon as it starts to boot off the hard drive.

Problem #2: the screen is messed up, and the BIOS will default to booting off the hard drive, which puts you into problem #1. Since you can't really see the boot menu, you will have a hard time figuring out how to get it to boot to the floppy.

Problem #3: (you may have this one fixed already) You need to get idecfg.exe and the new BIOS onto a 360k, bootable disk so you can flash the BIOS on the card.


Fix for #1,3: Take the drive and move it to a new machine, re-initialize it with DOS 5 or 6.22 or something, then move the drive back to XTIDE and it will probably start working. Make sure the HDD is the only one in the system when you prepare it, so that your partition table is active. While the HDD is on a newer machine, copy over idecfg.exe and the bios files you need.
Once you move the HDD back over to the XTIDE, just let it boot through the menu (which is corrupt on the display) but it should boot to the drive itself and the display will be normal again. run idecfg and flash it.


Fix for #2: You have 3 options.
1) pull the cable off the drive so it does't detect it. then it won't try to boot to it, and you should be able to boot to your floppy and run idecfg
2) pull the BIOS enable jumper off the card while booting, then put it back on after you've booted to your floppy.
3) hold down the ctrl key during POST-that will skip the XTIDE BIOS from loading (which should be the same as #2 here).


apologies for getting you into this mess. The core of the problem is that I have a very stale version of the BIOS here at work where my eeprom burner is and I keep forgetting to upgrade it to when this was fixed. In my defense, I do want to make sure there is an older version of the BIOS pre-flashed onto the eeprom when you get it from me, to not only force people to flash to test out their cards, but to also make sure it's a different version of the BIOS so that we can verify that flashing did indeed do something to the eeprom.


and yes, meant MDA, typed CGA. I have VGA on my test platform and that BIOS works fine on it, but I did see that messed up display once when playing with MDA.
 
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You've got nothing to apologize for. This is the coolest and most professional DIY effort I've come across. I'll get to work on your plan of attack and I'll document my efforts as best I can.

In regard to the preceding comment about my 63 watt power supply, it makes me wonder about my computer's history. I thought original PCs needed an expansion chassis for a hard drive. I also thought that first, quiet, black power supply was 63 watt and the later, noisy chrome supplies like mine supplied more juice. Anyway, I bought mine used with a loud 63 watt supply, drive adapter and the Seagate 20MB drive. I can only suppose that it worked at one time. I'm certain the hard drive was added a few years after the PC was built. I would also guess that more modern drives use less power than the huge and ancient Seagate 238R. But I also wondered if I was overtaxing my supply. I have a laptop drive with an adapter that I will experiment with.
 
heres the power requirements for the 238R:
POWER REQUIREMENTS: +12V START-UP (amps) _2.4
+12V TYPICAL (amps) __0.9
+5V TYPICAL (amps) ___0.8
TYPICAL (watts) ______14.8
MAXIMUM (watts) ______33

and the power requirements for a typical seagate IDE drive (ST310212A)
POWER REQUIREMENTS: +12V START-UP (amps) _1.5
POWER MANAGEMENT (Watts):
ACTIVE _______________7.0
IDLE _________________3.5
STANDBY ______________0.8

not exactly apples to apples in the specs, but I think you're just fine if the machine previously held any form of RLL/MFM drive and you've switched it out to PATA, as it now takes about 1/2 the wattage.

Anyone have power requirements for the motherboard and all the additional cards one might throw in a machine like this?
 
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I've got a problem.

Ok firstly, my card works just fine in my 486 and 286 systems.

When in my xt, it will get up to detecting the hdds then freeze. Machine locks. It displays:

Primary hdd: blahxxxx
Secondary hdd: none

That's it, freezes there. It's definitly got the "xt" bios on it too. So ATM I'm having to go for a 286 build instead of my 8088 (nec v20). :(
 
Looks like things are working now. Pretty simple really.
-- 8GB Drive was formatted to FAT16 using GParted live CD. I made a 2GB primary boot partition and three 2GB logical partitions.
-- I copied the BIOS files to a 3.5 floppy on my main desktop machine. I could read this on the IBM 5150 using a Backpack drive.
-- I flashed the BIOS (did not have to mess with any jumpers and I left Software Data Protect enabled). I basically just started IDECFG, loaded the latest XT BIOS and flashed.

Now the menu comes up and I have no more gibberish on the screen. The drive was correctly recognized. Pretty slick.

However, my attempt to load DOS 5 onto the drive were not successful. Is there a thread or wiki that describes how to properly partition, format, a load a hard drive to boot DOS? I've been searching with no luck so far. I don't really know how much storage space I'll need but I figured I'd try to load DOS 5.0 because it supports 2GB partitions. Inserting the 1st installation floppy took me straight to FDISK which quickly error'd out (apparently wiping the Gparted work I'd done). I thought maybe Gparted was the wrong tool to use so I tried partitioning again with FDISK. It seemed FDISK could not recognize the C: drive. Was it wrong to use a DOS installation disk? Maybe I need to copy files manually?

John
 
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MV75 said:
I've got a problem.

Ok firstly, my card works just fine in my 486 and 286 systems.

When in my xt, it will get up to detecting the hdds then freeze. Machine locks. It displays:

Primary hdd: blahxxxx
Secondary hdd: none

That's it, freezes there. It's definitly got the "xt" bios on it too. So ATM I'm having to go for a 286 build instead of my 8088 (nec v20). :(
Click to expand...

Ok, tried it again today, tried setting the pullup to H and L, no go. I even tried different processors, a siemens and an amd, but with those, after the part where it locked before, this time it just constantly drew JJJJJJ's on the screen as though the J key was depressed.
 
MV75:
Boot menu should appear after drive detection. If the problem is related to boot menu, you can disable boot menu with idecfg.com. There is an option to use A then C boot order or system boot loader. By the way, do you have default settings? If not, I recommend to try default BIOS settings.

twodogs:
DOS 5 installation program should not cause problems. I have installed both MS-DOS 5.00 and IBM-DOS 5.02. If I remember correctly, neither of them goes to FDISK since primary partition can be created from install program.

It is possible (but unlikely) that your main computer uses different addressing method that is not compatible with XTIDE Universal BIOS. I recommend to wipe all data using DBAN or similar program (you need to do this in your main computer). Then move the wiped hard disk back to XT and try to install DOS.
 
Thanks for that tip. The only thing I changed before flashing the card was the amount of time from 30 down to 5 seconds for the menu options to appear, otherwise it's standard.

While I'm on that, can I make a end user suggestion? Can it be made like the dos autoexec/config boot menu handles the timer? As in when you change a selection, the timer disables itself. As it is now with the xtide, when you change a selection the timer resets itself. I'd like the option for it to handle like the "dos boot menu" does, most times it'll go fine, count down and boot, but there may be a time you want it to sit on the boot menu for a very long time.

I'll have another look at the boot menu options. Thanks.
 
aitotat

I wiped my drive and installed it in my main computer (ABIT NS7 with Athlon 2600+). I used DOS 5.0 installation floppies on the modern machine to install DOS to the hard drive. I transferred the drive into the IBM 5150 and the STIDE card recognized it but would not boot. I then booted to floppy and tried to change into the C: directory but got an "Invalid Drive Specification" error. With everyone's help I'm making progress, but not quite there yet. I've posted some new videos showing the problem.

http://greenrenovation.wordpress.com/x-ibm-5150-pc/

John

edit: turned out to be a bad cable. The above method is a viable way to install DOS 5.0 - it later booted on my 5150 PC. The only thing I had to do was edit the config.sys file and delete the lines "himem.sys" and "DOS=high".
 
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You must wipe the drive with modern computer since DBAN does not work on XTs. Then you must install DOS on the XT system when the wiped drive is connected to XTIDE.

I don't think that was the problem since there is definitely something wrong based on the DOS 5 boot video. L-CHS is used instead of LBA, Block mode is not enabled and drive total capacity is simply wrong. What is the exact drive model?

Boot disk video showed IBM-DOS 2.10. It does not support DOS 5.0 partitions.
 
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