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XTIDE card dead...

Stone

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Joined
Nov 3, 2009
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12,814
Location
South Jersey, USA
My XTIDE card died a slow death. It doesn't detect drives any more. This happened slowly, over a period of several months. At first it would fail to detect an attached drive on rare occasions. Then it would fail to detect more and more often until finally it never detects any attached drive any more. It did take many months to go from sporadic to complete failure. The card's other functions seem to be OK in that it prompts for booting from a floppy drive or a 'foreign hard drive' if there is another drive/controller in the system. It just will no longer detect a drive connected to itself. I've cleaned all the contacts, reseated the EEPROM and even re-flashed it but nothing has changed its behavior. Any ideas?
 
There are not many things that can go wrong on XT-IDE:
- First of all make sure that your drive is still OK... That would be my first suspect.
- Slow failure might indicate corrosion and/or poor contact and soldering... check/re-seat jumpers, re-solder suspicions solder joints.
- Next try swapping the logic ICs... start with 74LS245, followed by 74LS573's, followed by chip select logic (the rest of ICs)

I think your EEPROM is OK since it looks that you're getting the XT-IDE BIOS extension messages.
 
-I've been using some SSDs with it and they all still work fine with an IDE card.

-All soldering still looks quite good.

-As far as ICs, no 74LS245 or 74LS573 on this card. In fact the only IC is an XC9572XL CPLD.

Any other possibilities?
 
Check the solder points for continuity with a multimeter. Giving solder joints a naked eye exam won't reveal anything. Solder fractures can be nearly impossible to see.
 
OK, fixed! I found some suspiciously thick solder between two of the CPLD chip's pins and after giving those pins a little separation it works again. I don't quite know how, after two or three years the solder migrated but it appears to have done just that! I had been running the system in a rather hot room this past summer, though. It was 90 - 95 in there during the day so maybe that combined with the chip running hot (if it does) were contributing factors.
 
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