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Need help w/ XT-IDE and IBM 8525

S

Shadow Lord

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Hello All,

I've been trying to help a friend of mine get his XT-IDE (DP ver. 2 board) up and running to boot a HDD in an IBM 8525. It is a bit difficult since he is across the country but we have made progress. However, we still cannot get the system to boot.

The card is recognized by the system, the boot menu comes up. At first we could not get it to find a HDD. However, after a bunch of trial error we were able to get the drive to be recognized. We booted w/ a DOS 6.22 disk, ran fdisk /mbr, and everything seems to have completed but after reboot the HDD will not format. Checking with fdisk shown no partition info at all.

The XT-IDE is the only card in the system, booting from floppies is fine with no issues. We also have gotten a 1h error at times. Finally, to rule out the HDD as an issue we tried to boot using the serial connection. The card is seen by the server but when we attempt to boot again we get a 1h error.

Config info as follows:

ide_xt.bin: v2.0.0B3 (2013-03-02)
Full Operating Mode: No
IDE Controllers: 1
Power Management: Disabled

Device Type: XTIDE r1
Base Address: 300h
Control Block: 308h

Master & Slave Settings:
Block Mode Transfers: Yes
CHS Translation: Auto
Internal Write Cache: Disabled
User Specified CHS/LBA: No

Boot Settings:
Display Mode: Default
Number of Floppy Dr.: Auto
Scan for Serial Drives: No
Default Boot Drive: 80h

The BIOS chip is an amtel http://www.atmel.com/images/doc0270.pdf

EEPROM type: 2864
SDP: Enable
Page Size: 1 byte
EEPROM Address: D000h
Generate Checksum byte: Yes

At this point I am stumped. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
 
Stone,

We have been through eight drives so far with similar results. While I can see that there is a tiny chance all eight drives could be bad that still would not explain the failure to boot via serial port.
 
Shadow Lord said:
....... We booted w/ a DOS 6.22 disk, ran fdisk /mbr, and everything seems to have completed but after reboot the HDD will not format. Checking with fdisk shown no partition info at all.....
Click to expand...

So After running Fdisk and partitioning the drive and making the partition active which seems to complete successfully, Upon rebooting the machine the hard drive is still raw ? If so, double / triple check all solder joints with a magnifying glass and reflow. I don't own any DP boards but have had this problem before with a R1 card a long time ago and it actually turned out to be a chip gone bad. Have you tried the card / drive in a different machine ?.

Is this thread a continuation of the thread started in XTIDE Tech Support.
 
Malc said:
So After running Fdisk and partitioning the drive and making the partition active which seems to complete successfully, Upon rebooting the machine the hard drive is still raw ? If so, double / triple check all solder joints with a magnifying glass and reflow. I don't own any DP boards but have had this problem before with a R1 card a long time ago and it actually turned out to be a chip gone bad. Have you tried the card / drive in a different machine ?.

Is this thread a continuation of the thread started in XTIDE Tech Support.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is the essence. Testing in another machine is hard to do as he only has the 8525 w/ ISA ports. We can dig up an 8530 (maybe) but that is a 286 16bit machine so all the settings would need to change. We have tried to rule out the HDD by doing a boot over a serial connection and we get the same error.

If one of the solder joints was bad, would the card still boot up, load the FW, allow us to configure and flash it, etc.?
 
Shadow Lord said:
No. Running FDISK again shown no partition info.
Click to expand...

I've built 2 of the controllers, and soldering is paramount. I would take the time to go over the XT-IDE with a magnifying glass and make sure all of the components are where they should be, and no cold solder joints. There's no mumble-jumble about the controller. If it's assembled properly, it will work.
 
What about settings? Like I said the controller seems to be coming up, we are getting the boot menu, and it progresses to boot off of a FDD after the HDD is not found or nor working. So the controller seems to be working. I am wondering more if the issue is in our configuration of the board.
 
Shadow Lord said:
....If one of the solder joints was bad, would the card still boot up, load the FW, allow us to configure and flash it, etc.?
Click to expand...

Yes, Bios initialization and drive detection / Control are separate, Basically part of the card is not working ( The controller ) I'd go over the solder joints with a magnifying glass.
 
Malc said:
Yes, Bios initialization and drive detection / Control are separate, Basically part of the card is not working ( The controller ) I'd go over the solder joints with a magnifying glass.
Click to expand...

Okay. Will do. In the meantime anything else we should be looking at? Do we have the card configured correctly? Thanks.
 
It looks okay though as i said i don't own any DP boards, I assume you've already tried the suggestions made in the xtide tech support thread, using the latest xtide universal bios (r588) from svn etc, Though it does sound like a hardware issue to me, Bad solder joint or bad chip, also check all tracks for damage.
 
I have a DP v2 board and over time it slowly exhibited intermittent difficulty in booting (or recognizing) any HDD until it got to the point where now it never does anything with any HDDs.
 
What card edge connector finish does it have? And, is this a 3v3 CPLD equipped board (-XL suffix on chip)?
 
This is consistent with the other cards using this CPLD. For reasons still unknown, it seems this just isn't compatible long term with the ISA bus.
 
Can the 3.3v CPLD be replaced with the 5v version easily, ie: no major mods ?.
 
Also as posted on the other thread, use the newer BIOS from my site and try it configured as both XTIDE Rev1 and also the chuck-mod version if that doesn't work.
 
Malc said:
Can the 3.3v CPLD be replaced with the 5v version easily, ie: no major mods ?.
Click to expand...

They are pin compatible, however the 5v parts are long out of production. If you can find one, just short 3v3 to 5v, remove the regulator and replace the CPLD.
 
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