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cannot boot from CF card on 486

oblivion

oblivion

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been working on a 486 I'm putting together for limited use and I wanted to try using a CF card as a hdd replacement (512mb SanDisk) but apparently this motherboard (its a packard bell) is very picky about what hard drives it accepts. The only IDE drive I've gotten it to boot from without trouble is an old Conner 420MB drive. The BIOS has no auto IDE detection so you have to input the hdd values manually. I initially tried the CF card in another 486 I have and it installed and booted from it with no problems but when I try it on this other 486 the hdd light comes on and then I get "non-system disk or disk error"

I've tried using an older thick IDE cable from the period with same result, tried the drive alone with no CD drive on the cable, tried running the CF as slave, same effect. If I boot off a floppy though I can access and see the CF card fine as drive C: I just cant seem to boot from it. Also i tried installing DOS from the 486 in question and it always fails at 99% citing an error with command.com. (my DOS disks are good though and work fine in other PC's) I also get these exact same issues when trying to use any modern IDE hard drive. It will not boot to it and If i try to install DOS I get an error at 99%

my other option is SCSI but even that has given me issues. This system only has ISA slots and as far as I know there are no ISA SCSI controllers that use 68 pin connections just 50 pin. I only own 1 50pin SCSI drive which is a 2gb seagate BUT it also gives me issues. I can install DOS fine to it but it will not boot from the hdd. i get a "operating system not found error"

BUT

I can get a modern 68 pin SCSI drive from 2000ish to work and boot fine by using a 50 pin to 68 pin adapter. the issue? the adapter sticks out just enough that it makes the HDD not fit in the case mounting. being a very small compact 486 case I have no alternate place to mount the drive.

with all that being said any idea why I cant boot from this CF card?
 
fdisk/mbr didn't seem to do anything. actually I was wrong though. I can "see" the C: drive and install things to it but nothing on it will run. for example I can install a game fine but when I go to run that game i get "retry, abort, fail" message. same with running DOS commands from the C drive even though The files are there.
 
I'm thinking you a have system BIOS incompatibility on that particular mobo. I'm assuming you have ISA slots on your mobo? If you have a 16-bit controller laying around (one with it's own BIOS), You could disable the on-board system BIOS and give it a shot. I have CF cards that work with most of my 486 boards but I have 1 or 2 that don't.
 
Agent Orange said:
I'm thinking you a have system BIOS incompatibility on that particular mobo. I'm assuming you have ISA slots on your mobo? If you have a 16-bit controller laying around (one with it's own BIOS), You could disable the on-board system BIOS and give it a shot. I have CF cards that work with most of my 486 boards but I have 1 or 2 that don't.
Click to expand...

yhea, that's the route I think I may take. I don't have a card handy but do know the onboard I/O can be disabled.
 
One of the things I've struggled with is some BIOSes refusing to play nice when the CF indicates that it's a removable device. You might run an IDE information utility from floppy to see what it says.
 
If this is the same Packard Bell from the other thread, I can't get it to boot at all from a CF card, but I can access it from a DOS floppy. It also says drive error on startup.

The only access issue I get from a DOS floppy is trying to format the drive, it always reports a drive error.
 
Compgeke said:
If this is the same Packard Bell from the other thread, I can't get it to boot at all from a CF card, but I can access it from a DOS floppy. It also says drive error on startup.

The only access issue I get from a DOS floppy is trying to format the drive, it always reports a drive error.
Click to expand...

yhea, same PB. Mine doesnt give me a drive error, it hangs for a few seconds and the hdd busy light comes on then I get "non-system disk or disk error" message. If I boot from a floppy I can see the C drive and I can install things to it but after installed I cant run anything, just get "abort,retry,fail" messages.

i'm probibly just going to hunt down a ide controller with a bios.
 
If you can find a GSI Model 18 controller card you should be good. It has its own BIOS which can override the system BIOS. I have one installed in a 386 machine which doesn't even allow "user" hdds. Only the numbered official ones. I have two Conner drives attached to it. I have the instruction sheet if you find a card.
 
Billyray said:
If you can find a GSI Model 18 controller card you should be good. It has its own BIOS which can override the system BIOS. I have one installed in a 386 machine which doesn't even allow "user" hdds. Only the numbered official ones. I have two Conner drives attached to it. I have the instruction sheet if you find a card.
Click to expand...

i'll defiantly keep an eye out. I think id be happy with SCSI but its silly that that adapter just makes the hard drive not fit, if i stick it on the hard drive the drive wont fit in its mounting bay and if I put the adaptor on the card end it sticks out so the case lid won't fit back on. The conner drive gives me a speed rating on sysspeed of about 30, when I used my 50 pin seagate scsi (that the system will not boot from for whatever reason) all it jumped was something like 5 points to 35 but when I used the newer 68 pin scsi drive I got a rating of over 100.

its off the immediate topic but does anyone know if the headland video chip on this thing is any good? I tried installing a tseng 4000 but It was giving me a lot of garbled graphics, may be the card...
 
The headland chip on the Packard Bell 486 has a timing problem which causes trails of dots and corruption on some games like Sim City 2000. I remember this because SC2000's readme mentioned that card/chip specifically.

Hmm, if your tseng is giving you garbled video it may have faulty video memory. Or you may need to disable the onboard video on the motherboard.
 
Eep386 said:
The headland chip on the Packard Bell 486 has a timing problem which causes trails of dots and corruption on some games like Sim City 2000. I remember this because SC2000's readme mentioned that card/chip specifically.

Hmm, if your tseng is giving you garbled video it may have faulty video memory. Or you may need to disable the onboard video on the motherboard.
Click to expand...

thanks for the heads up on the headland chip. I did have the onboard disabled, it could be the tseng, I may try cleaning the contacts again and hope that helps. if not I have an ISA diamond speedster that used the CL chip that's supposed to be pretty decent.
 
well, Now that this setup is almost complete I've hit another issue. now my CD-ROM drive can not be recognized. when I'. running of the onboard IDE with the conner hdd and the CD drive its detected and runs fine but after adding a Silicon Valley ADP-60 IDE controller I cannot get my CD drive to be detected. With the IDE controller my CF hdd boots up flawlessly but I get a drivers for device not found error. The driver are their and I've gone over the .sys and .bat files and its all as it should be. I tried a different CD drive and tried swapping slave/master settings to no avail. I tried having the CF card on the controller and the CD drive on the onboard IDE but that freezes the system on boot. I even tried using a SB16 clone card that has a IDE connector on it for CD drives but when I do this the system will not even display.

also, oddly enough I discovered the video issues I was having with the Tseng 4000 card only occur when I'm using the onboard IDE and not the IDE controller.....just weird.
 
Hmm... that IS strange. It's possible the IDE controller and the onboard IDE are both trying to use the same I/O address and IRQ (why it hangs). Any way you can set the ADP-60 card to use the secondary I/O and IRQ addresses?
 
Run MSD or an equivalent and check for an IRQ conflict. Also, don't rule out a CF card that's not playing nice with the system even though it boots.
 
Agent Orange said:
Run MSD or an equivalent and check for an IRQ conflict. Also, don't rule out a CF card that's not playing nice with the system even though it boots.
Click to expand...

I'll try running MSD but I don't think its the CF card. I tried running the CD drive and the old conner IDE drive together on the IDE controller card and I get the same issue with no drivers found when the exact same setup works fine with the onboard IDE.
 
got it to work....

I did it by connecting the CF card to the IDE controller and the CD drive to the on board IDE BUT it had to be done very specificly. the CD drive had to be set to cable select, Master or Slave would result in the drive not being found. also I had to use an older style IDE cable.

now I had both a CF hdd and a CD drive but now that I had something connected to the onboard IDE I was getting all kind of graphical issues from the Tseng 4000. keep in mind the card displayed flawlessly if nothing is connected to the on board IDE...so in the end I had to replace it with a 1MB CL based ISE speedster Pro card which if memory serves me is still a very good and "fast" ISA card for DOS.
 
I suspect that using the older style IDE cable would have solved the problem itself as the 80 wire IDE cable has one of the pins disconnected from service.
 
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