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Hard drive refuses to work on weird IBM 5170

jacobtohahn

Experienced Member
Joined
May 1, 2018
Messages
79
Location
North Carolina, USA
Hi all,

I received an IBM PC 5170 as a donation recently and just got around to checking if it works and restoring it if necessary. I did a quick check of the condition under the cover (it was attic stored in hot North Carolina summers for at least 25 years) and found it to be very good, only a little dusty, so I put a DOS boot disk in the drive and it fired right up after an error saying that SETUP needed to be run. Next, I tried accessing the hard drive under DOS and found nothing mapped to the C drive and "no fixed disks present" when running FDISK, so obviously the hard drive wasn't working right. It did spin up on startup but I heard no activity, so I thought the SETUP issue had something to do with it. Unfortunately, I can't find my diagnostics disk anywhere, so I went with the BASIC method of setting up the computer. I removed all disks from the drives, restarted, and waited for the computer to boot to BASIC... but it never did. I got "Non system disk or disk error" on the screen instead. Same thing after removing power from all drives.

Obviously something was up, so I did a much closer inspection on the inside and found a few really weird things. There was no IBM HDD/Floppy controller card. Instead, it had been replaced by some cards taken from an Epson Equity computer (see the section titled "HDD Controller WHDC" in this PDF). The BIOS chips had been replaced, also with chips from an Epson. No wonder it didn't boot to BASIC. I reset the HDD card jumpers to factory defaults according to the PDF in an effort to get the drive working, but no luck.

So here's my question: how can I get this hard drive to work? I can't boot into BASIC to set the drive type, and I don't even know if that would work because the BIOS chips had been replaced. Any ideas or info would be appreciated. I don't want to have to program IBM BIOS chips and buy an IBM HDD/Floppy controller card!

P.S.: The hard drive is a CMI 6426, type number 2, 20MB, if that helps.
 
That message comes from the boot sector of your hard disk, not from the BIOS.
The message still appears when power is physically disconnected from all drives, so it doesn’t seem like it comes from the boot sector.

HP Support also claims that “The Non-System Disk Error or Disk Error message might appear when the computer BIOS cannot find a bootable operating system on any of the storage devices included in the notebook computer's boot path”.
 
That 5170 BIOS is a lot smarter than I recall--how can it tell a nonsystem disk from a system disk when all drives are disconnected?

But, as you said, the BIOS chips are from an Epson Equity. Have you tried replacing them with standard 5170 BIOS chips?
 
That 5170 BIOS is a lot smarter than I recall--how can it tell a nonsystem disk from a system disk when all drives are disconnected?
Seems like it just displays that message whenever it can’t boot to something, including when there’s no drives at all to boot from. It also does it when there’s no disk in the A: or B: drive with the hard drive disconnected, and of course if you insert a non-bootable disk.
 
But, as you said, the BIOS chips are from an Epson Equity. Have you tried replacing them with standard 5170 BIOS chips?
I haven’t. I don’t have any 5170 BIOS chips on hand right now. I could drag a broken 5170 that I have out of storage and use the ones from it, maybe, but I wonder if they’d work with the third-party HDD controller.

As far as I know, the computer worked when it was put into the attic 25 years ago, but maybe it actually didn’t. I would try low-level formatting the drive just in case the data is all corrupted, but I’m not sure how.
 
Most third-party HDD controllers either conform to the port mappings of the native 5170 controller or have a ROM of their own to supply BIOS functions. You need the 5170 diagnostics floppy otherwise (if no HDC ROM present/enabled).
 
An update on this:
I was able to get the drive working, but it did require me to program new BIOS chips. I chose to use the AMI 286 BIOS because it has a built in setup utility and also a diagnostics program. The drive needed to be low level formatted in the diagnostics program to be recognized by SpinRite or FDISK after setting the drive type in the setup utility, but now it works perfectly and no errors are reported in SpinRite. The B: drive, which was a 2.5" 1.44mb floppy drive, was physically damaged (the head was getting caught on something), so I replaced it. I installed MS-DOS 5.0 on the C: drive so the system is all good to go now.
 
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