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XTIDE Universal BIOS

Ok now I have flashed on the latest version from Malc - I chose the XTIDE386 binary as I figured this is most compatible with my system

As before it works fine with the real hard drives.

It also now detects the 4GB CF card and I can see it in FDISK. I can create a partition without any problems; however when I exit FDISK and reboot the computer the partition is gone (and all it says is 'no partition defined').

I have tried both the SB IDE ports and the main controller IDE ports. I have also checked in the bios that no virus protection is active (long shot as I just FDISK'd the real hard drives and it worked fine).
 
Bit of extra info:

A 4GB Cactus industrial CF card reports the correct size of 4000mb in FDISK. A 128MB CF card shows up as ~600MB and and a 64MB card shows up as around 200MB.

Another peculiarity is that the when XTIDE bios is loaded it displays the 'device ID strings' associated with each device it detects. The hard drive shows up fine; but the CF card string is garbled and has zero's at the end. I.E. instead of CACTUS 4GB it approximately displays GACTUS%4GB 0 0 0 0.

I tried reflashing with the AT file (XTIDE-AT) but it did exactly the same thing. I then tried disabling interrupts in XTIDECFG on the Primary/Secondary IDE controllers and that resulted in the CF card not being detected at all. I then re enabled them and made sure my SB card IDE port was on IRQ 15 which it was.

Anyone able to shed some light on this? Heaps of people use this bios so I am guessing its something simple/setting related on my end.
 
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Trixter said:
Try configuring it for super-slow XT mode, which transfers a byte at a time, slowly. See if that makes a difference.
Click to expand...

By that do you mean loading up the XTIDE AT binary in XTIDECFG and then telling it the device type is 16-bit ISA/VLB in 8 bit mode?

Or do you mean just flash XTIDE XT version?
 
This is likely either a power supply (to the CompactFlash) card issue, bus timing, or level interfacing (CF is a CMOS spec).

What controller are you using, and what IDE to CompactFlash adapter? Re the latter, ensure it is set to 5V and use a dedicated supply to it I.e. Floppy power connector. If cabling between the two use only 80-wire cable.

Hope that helps.
 
Well I have sorted it out.... The fault was the last thing I thought it would be.

I was using a IDE-CF adaptor I got from China about 3 years ago. It was working fine in my XT (in this case as a slave drive) and I had no issues whatsoever.

On a limb I thought I would try another IDE-CF adaptor from my other XT (same type and batch as the other one, and also working for years as a master). This one partially worked; the device name was still corrupt but FDISK worked and I had partitions. I then formatted the partitions and copied some files over. It then fell apart; all the filenames were corrupt and garbled. Nothing could be copied to/from successfully without filename and data corruption.

Thinking that this couldn't be a coincidence I took at look at each adaptor under a magnifier. One had an bridged solder joint between two of the pins leading to the CF header. The other had a dry solder joint and two bridged pins. Remember both worked fine with XT style 8-bit transfers; but both broke when trying to use 16 bit transfers. So if you have CF adaptors that work in one PC but not another; take a close look!

I reflowed the solder joints on both adaptors. They now work perfectly. Thanks everyone for your suggestions!
 
The bridged joints are probably grounds, Good job on finding the cause of the problem :)
 
Wow, I missed the pre-built binaries links on the new homepage, where is it?
The archive I posted above is not needed then since there is an official one :)
 
keropi said:
Wow, I missed the pre-built binaries links on the new homepage, where is it?
The archive I posted above is not needed then since there is an official one :)
Click to expand...

It's not on the main page. I read the whole thing top to bottom in an attempt to work out how to download the binaries. I eventually just started clicking on all the links on the page one at a time in order to find them, this lead me here, then starting at the end I had to go back posts till I found the link here.

Can I make a suggestion? If so, then the suggestion is simply to put the link to the binary downloads at the top of the page in a clear manner (like "Download the pre-compiled binaries here").

Also, what is the current version? The main page goes on about V2.0.0 Beta 2, but the binaries are listed as Rxxx, so it is very difficult to correlate the version talked about in the wiki to the pre-compiled binary.
 
To be honest I would ignore version numbers as the project is now just using build numbers. Always go with the latest build as it's in a bug fix state currently, i.e. very little new functionality has been added for a while.

Download links, forums, bug tracker are all things I would like to do. Any volunteers able to muck in would always be welcome :)
 
pearce_jj said:
... Always go with the latest build ...
Click to expand...
I have to disagree here. The latest version doesn't work on my "HIGHLY MODIFIED 5155". I can't get anything newer than r588 working, possibly due to timing issues. I have an AST HotShot 286 Accelerator running at 10mhz and at that speed the newer versions don't work. r588 works perfectly however.
 
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pearce_jj said:
Browse source at the top
Click to expand...
The problem is, and I realised this only after about 15 minutes: the site is displayed in Dutch. I started to notice when looking at one of the makefiles, on the top left of the text was the word 'regel' displayed, meaning line number in this case. Going back to the link you gave me, I noticed that the words 'Bron weergeven' were white-on-black. Then I realised that this meant I was looking at the source code part. The funny thing is, we Dutch also use the word 'sources', or more often 'source code'. The way 'bron' is used here is actually wrong, it should have been 'broncode' or even 'brontekst'. The Dutch version of Wikipedia uses 'brontekst' so one can have a look at the source code how the page has been written. And I assumed this 'Bron weergeven' meant the same. Not one hair on my head, and I have still a lot, thought about 'source code'.

Thanks!
 
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