486: XTIDE Universal Bios not loading on startup

[Divarin]

I have had for the past few years this 486 (a dx-33) which has been relying on the XTIDE Universal Bios (sitting on a rom chip in a network card) to support the hard drive in the system.
The hard drive is an 80 gig drive but is recognized as an 8 gig drive and I have currently 2 2-gig partitions (I haven't needed to use the other 2 gigs)
That is all working fine but now I am in the process of swapping out the motherboard so that I can upgrade to a DX2-66 and giving me the option to use an VLB video card in the future.
I have moved over all of the cards from the previous motherboard to the new but the XTIDE boot screen does not show up.
I seem to remember when I was setting up the dx-33 system that I had to enable an option in the CMOS menu to enable an "option rom". however this system has no such option.
The new motherboard is a Shuttle HOT-419 and it's using an AMI-BIOS.
The AMIBIOS does auto-detect the drive as an 8 gig drive but freezes on startup before boot.
Any ideas why the XTIDE Universal Bios is not being executed on POST?

 

[modem7]

Try running the DOS tool 'RAYXTIDE' to see if software (which includes the motherboard BIOS) has the ability to 'see' the XTIDE Universal BIOS (XUB).

This check is a kind of, 'Are we getting to first base?'

 

[Divarin]

Alright it looks like I have a completely separate issue. I removed as much from the computer as I could (kept video card and floppy/IDE controller card) and connected only one floppy drive (no hard drive) and tried to boot off of a floppy.
This still locked up just after POST.

This motherboard did not have a BIOS chip in it when I got it so I downloaded/wrote to an EPROM a bios from here: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/shuttle-hot-419. There's 4 on that page and I had used the bottom one (419AIP06) but I noticed that in my BIOS screen I didn't have a "failsafe" configuration option which I saw in the manual.

I went back and wrote the R2.0 BIOS and that worked, XTIDE Universal Bios came up (after putting NIC back in) but now the system has a new issue. When trying to boot from floppy it would get in a reboot loop and when trying to boot off hard drive it would lock up and kill the display (monitor would go to "no signal")

I went into BIOS and tried (the new) failsafe mode and that worked, I could now boot to floppy (haven't tried hard drive yet ran out of time)

My task today is to write down all of the BIOS settings for failsafe, then go back to default configuration and try changing each setting to its failsafe setting until I find which one is causing the reboot loop. If I'm lucky it'll just be one setting, maybe a bad cache chip or something.

Anyway I don't know what my issue is now but I do know it has nothing to do with the XTIDE Universal BIOS.

 

[Divarin]

Alright it looks like I have a completely separate issue. I removed as much from the computer as I could (kept video card and floppy/IDE controller card) and connected only one floppy drive (no hard drive) and tried to boot off of a floppy.
This still locked up just after POST.

This motherboard did not have a BIOS chip in it when I got it so I downloaded/wrote to an EPROM a bios from here: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/shuttle-hot-419. There's 4 on that page and I had used the bottom one (419AIP06) but I noticed that in my BIOS screen I didn't have a "failsafe" configuration option which I saw in the manual.

I went back and wrote the R2.0 BIOS and that worked, XTIDE Universal Bios came up (after putting NIC back in) but now the system has a new issue. When trying to boot from floppy it would get in a reboot loop and when trying to boot off hard drive it would lock up and kill the display (monitor would go to "no signal")

I went into BIOS and tried (the new) failsafe mode and that worked, I could now boot to floppy (haven't tried hard drive yet ran out of time)

My task today is to write down all of the BIOS settings for failsafe, then go back to default configuration and try changing each setting to its failsafe setting until I find which one is causing the reboot loop. If I'm lucky it'll just be one setting, maybe a bad cache chip or something.

Anyway I don't know what my issue is now but I do know it has nothing to do with the XTIDE Universal BIOS.

Update: yeah definitely a cache issue, I might need some help there too but I'll post that question separately since the subject line on this is about XTIDE.