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XTIDE tech support thread

Guessing that the MO drive is presenting itself as more of a removable media/CD-ROM drive, of which you would need additional drivers to get to work.
that's a guess. I've never worked with one o' those before. That additional driver would need to be written/modified to use the slightly tweaked IDE ports that the XTIDE card gives us to work with. A CF device is more IDE-like than CD-ROM is, and that's why XTIDE supports it natively.
 
hargle said:
Guessing that the MO drive is presenting itself as more of a removable media/CD-ROM drive.....
Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I thought and seem to recall from the 90's. I have a Future Domain TMC 850 8 bit SCSI card which will however see the MO drive and so I'll use XTIDE for CF on one machine and SCSI on the other. Pity though, magneto Optical drives appeared in the late eighties from memory, with a capacity of 128MB, and so installing one in an IBM XT keeps the machine 80'sish if you exclude the fact that the MO drive may be 2.3GB instead of 128MB (they are all fully backwards compatible from .128 to 2.3GB which is very nice).
 
I've just got the XT-IDE BIOS (2.0) installed in a 386 system, as I mentioned in another thread, and I had a couple of questions.

First, on drive-detect, it claims "Error 80h," but there seems to be no trouble with the drive whatsoever: recognizes the full capacity, partitions, formats and boots without issue. Is this indicative of anything, or just a quirk?

Second, I currently have it burned with interrupts disabled (I *think* my multi-I/O card supports IRQ 15 for IDE, but I'm not certain and just wanted to get it up and running.) Being as DOS is fundamentally single-tasking anyway, that's no problem for DOS, and Windows probably won't get much boost out of it either, but I am considering giving OS/2 a shot - would it be worth it to try and get it using IRQs for that?
 
I've been dealing with my CF card troubles in the PC/Clone forum, but it might be more appropriate here. I've installed XTIDE 2.0 in my IBM 5170's mother board in it's extra ROM banks (u17 and u37). I'm using an Acculogic SIDE-3 controller. It works great so far. CF cards that were troublesome before are no long a problem except one. I have a Seagate St1 2.5 gb microdrive that isn't being recognized correctly. It shows up as "S" in the boot menu and is IDed as having only 17mb. FDisk agrees when I launch it. The drive is formatted for FAT on a Mac which shouldn't be a problem. This is one of the drives listed as compatible in the Wiki so I'm a bit confused. Any ideas?
 
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Power it with 5V and set it to master with no slave on that channel. It should be detected OK.
 
Well crap!

I picked up a Dangerous XTIDE a while back and finally got a chance to play with it. It WAS working fine and I decided to update the BIOS and flash it to the 2.0.

Ran the XTIDECFG program and everything SEEMED to go just fine when I picked the XT.bin file to flash. Looked at the configurations but didn't change anything as it looked okay. Hit flash and it claimed to have written the file okay.

Pulled out the diskette and let it reboot. NOTHING!

NADA!!!

Now when I even try to boot from the floppy the danged computer hangs up after identifying the floppy drive. If I removed the XTIDE everything boots up fine. But with that XTIDE, sucker just sits there gathering dust.

Any suggestions?

Is it possible to "zero out" the EEPROM so I can start from scratch?

Thanks,
 
curtis said:
If I removed the XTIDE everything boots up fine. But with that XTIDE, sucker just sits there gathering dust.
Any suggestions? Is it possible to "zero out" the EEPROM so I can start from scratch?
Click to expand...
1. Remove ROM ENABLE jumper on card.
2. Boot up machine with card installed.
3. Whilst machine is running, put ROM ENABLE jumper back on.
4. Reflash.
 
Stupid observation no. 547:

If that doesn't work and you have access to a PROM programmer, you can also program the EEPROM that way in case that something on your board isn't doing what it should.
 
Well, I had some success. Using modem7's advice I was able to boot the computer and it appears the flashing worked. At least it said it was successful. Had to disable SDP to get that far.

However, the controller is recognized absolutely NO drives attached to it.

I've tried a variety of 3.5" drives (even an old 351AX), several 2" and even a couple of CF microdrives. Nothing is recognized as being attached.

Still open to suggestions.
 
curtis said:
Well, I had some success. Using modem7's advice I was able to boot the computer and it appears the flashing worked. At least it said it was successful. Had to disable SDP to get that far.

However, the controller is recognized absolutely NO drives attached to it.

I've tried a variety of 3.5" drives (even an old 351AX), several 2" and even a couple of CF microdrives. Nothing is recognized as being attached.

Still open to suggestions.
Click to expand...

I/O address settings in BIOS you flashed match up with DIP switches on card?

EDIT: I don't even know if this is necessary anymore on new BIOS's, mine has OLD BIOS on it still and it has to all match up for it to work.
 
curtis said:
Well, I had some success. Using modem7's advice I was able to boot the computer and it appears the flashing worked. At least it said it was successful. Had to disable SDP to get that far.

However, the controller is recognized absolutely NO drives attached to it.
Click to expand...

Hi, looking back at the sale thread, these seemed to be 'Chuck-mod' equipped, so select "XT IDE rev 2 or modded rev 1" as the primary adapter type (that is the text on R435 of the Universal BIOS configurator). Should be on defaults of IO 300h, BIOS D000h. Hope that helps!
 
That got it! Somehow the IO got moved to 1 something or other. Also picking out the right .bin file probably helped too! I loaded the IDE-XT.bin figuring it would be the most compatible.

Out of curiosity,what are all the different .bin files and what do they apply to? I was looking all over the place and couldn't find it. Could I possibly use one of the others and be okay?

Right now, I'm using a test bed of a '286 with a Make-It 486 cpu on a USA Teknik motherboard with 512K RAM and an Award BIOS.

Ultimately this hard drive subsystem is going into a Bodega Bay expanded Amiga 500 with a 386SX-25 bridgeboard.

pearce_jj said:
Hi, looking back at the sale thread, these seemed to be 'Chuck-mod' equipped, so select "XT IDE rev 2 or modded rev 1" as the primary adapter type (that is the text on R435 of the Universal BIOS configurator). Should be on defaults of IO 300h, BIOS D000h. Hope that helps!
Click to expand...
 
And now for something completely different... for me, anyway... a D0000 ROM error with the XTIDE installed, but the computer (a 5155 portable) works fine when the XTIDE is removed.

I received a V1 card (hargle thinks it's the very first one assembled) and sorted out some conflicts with an SP2FD card by reversing the slot order of the cards so that the XTIDE came before the SP2FD.

Then, for a couple of days, the system worked fine with a 128mb Sandisk CF card serving as my hard disk. But today, the computer refused to boot, displaying a D0000 ROM error instead and then taking me to BASIC when I pressed F1.

Since the XTIDE is the only component that's been added to the system lately, I removed it to see what would happen. The computer works fine without it, although it's a drag for me to go back to floppies after experiencing the XTIDE-CF combo.

I looked online for the error code, and it says I have to replace the "cluster adapter," whatever that is. So, is there something called a cluster adapter on the XTIDE card, and if so, how does one replace it?
 
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