BIOS updates or Manuals for an NEC Ready 433

[haightc]

I have been having a heck of time trying to get any of my IDE DOMs or CF drives to work with the machine. The BIOS seems to be unusual to me, I can choose bios detect type 1-47 or enter CHS format info. Even though it's a 486 is seems to be limited in manual configuration at all, I can't seems to get a CHS configuration for my 256mb DOM or 512MB CF to work for the life of me. Unfortunately, I have been able to find any online but a a simple two page third party spec sheet. Ideas?

 

[GiGaBiTe]

If you need CHS info for the DOMs, try putting them in a more modern motherboard (like a socket 7 board) and getting that board to give you the CHS info.

 

[haightc]

If you need CHS info for the DOMs, try putting them in a more modern motherboard (like a socket 7 board) and getting that board to give you the CHS info.

First DOM is 2gb
Disk /dev/sdb: 2 GB, 2102563840 bytes
65 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1019 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 4030 * 512 = 2063360 bytes
So it looks like I can use this one

512mb CF
Disk /dev/sdb: 509 MB, 509967360 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 62 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
63 sectors is okay, but I only allowed to enter 16 heads max

For what ever reason I can't get my 256mb DOM to show up when attached to usb

 

[GiGaBiTe]

The IDE controllers that are used in those USB adapters are usually very cheap and aren't forgiving of drives that have weird specs or non-standard timings. Another thing they usually expect is the drive to be set to master, if the drive is set to cable select or slave it may not be detected at all or behave erratically.

 

[haightc]

The IDE controllers that are used in those USB adapters are usually very cheap and aren't forgiving of drives that have weird specs or non-standard timings. Another thing they usually expect is the drive to be set to master, if the drive is set to cable select or slave it may not be detected at all or behave erratically.

True, it possible to DOM is bad. I was able to use the 2gb DOM, using the high capacity setting of 502mb which I think is type 34. My computer just beeps at me now when I try to use the cf ide adpater with the 512mb card. Suggesting the adapter or card has gone bad.

I am going to look into using an overlay to get full access to the DOM. Do this overlays add noticable overhead? I trying using the same bios setting with my 8gb DOM and the bios errored. If I use a boot loader like plop can I set no drive on slave position, then boot it via plop? Not sure what I would needit for maybe though BSD, winNT or a low resource and/or cli only linux distro. Given how resource intensive modern linux distros are it would be pushing it on this machine.

Originally I was planning on just imaging the existing hard drive but like you mentioned it jsut to old for anything to recognize it.