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5170 IDE Hard Drive

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bugman2112

Experienced Member
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Jan 7, 2008
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Location
Clifton Park, NY
I have some questions regarding setting up my recently acquired IBM.
I have an early 5170 with the piggy back RAM.
I have a rev 1 , XTIDE board with v.10 BIOS
I have a 3rd party, 16 bit, IDE / FDD controller (from Jameco).

I have a western digital 6.4G hard drive that I am trying to get to work.
With the XTIDE, no problem. It boots just fine from the menu.

I am curious why I cant get the 6.4G hard drive to work with the XTIDE removed, using the IDE controller.
I can access the drive via DOS 5.0, partition with FDISK, and even format and transfer system /s. It just wont boot. I hear the drive running, but it gets no further.
This motherboard has the AMI BIOS, and I use the custom setting and set a small size that DOS can use 1024/16/63.
Any thoughts on what is going on here? The controller has a 3.5 drive, and a 5.25 drive attached, both of which work fine.
 
bugman2112 said:
I am curious why I cant get the 6.4G hard drive to work with the XTIDE removed, using the IDE controller.
I can access the drive via DOS 5.0, partition with FDISK, and even format and transfer system /s. It just wont boot. I hear the drive running, but it gets no further.
This motherboard has the AMI BIOS, and I use the custom setting and set a small size that DOS can use 1024/16/63.
Any thoughts on what is going on here?
Click to expand...
Have you tried a partition/format at a lower CHS, say, 600/4/17, just as an experiment?
 
I just remembered that there are 5 total parameters to enter for the custom Hard drive inthe AMI BIOS. Cyl, Heads, Sect, and two more that I didnt recognize so I kept them at "0". I will look those up and post tonight. Perhaps I just need to set those.
 
Well, if I cant get it to boot, I can always just boot off of A: then access the hard drive. Not optimal, but at least I can take advantage of the storage space.
And I do still have my XTIDE which works great. I was exploring options becasue I have multiple machines.
 
When you boot from drive A what to you see on drive C? Can you see a partition? Files? All the files that you know are there?
 
The 5170 is going to be expecting an old ST506 type hard drive. There is a table in ROM with 20 or 40 different hard drive entries that you can choose from. (The number of drives in the table depends on the BIOS version.) Unfortunately, those table entries almost always assume 17 sectors per track because that is what all ST506 hard drives looked like back then.

IDE drives are register compatible with the old ST506 interface so it is possible to use one with the standard/primitive BIOS that is built in. But if you do so, you have to accept some limitations - like not being able to use the entire drive if the drive has more than 17 sectors per track, a large number of heads, or a large number of cylinders.

For the first IDE hard drives this was not a problem - they were small. But for later IDE hard drives it was possible to do a little remapping on the CHS values to make better use of the hard drive. (The number of bits for CHS in the BIOS is different than the number of bits for CHS in the IDE spec, which was a real knucklehead move.)

The XT-IDE works so well with later hard drives because it translates the CHS addressing used by the BIOS to LBA addressing used by modern IDE hard drives. In theory the modern IDE hard drives should be capable of using CHS addressing as well, but the LBA method is much cleaner.

SCSI subsystems never had these problems - they effectively always had LBA style addressing from the start. Which is why way back when if you wanted a big hard drive you got a SCSI adapter. (The SCSI adapter provides its own INT13 BIOS that gets used instead of the standard hard disk BIOS.)

Anyway, if you can see the hard disk after booting from a floppy be careful. If the sectors per track that the hard drive was formatted with doesn't match what the BIOS is using parts of the drive will be visible and others will look to be corrupted. I would just start from scratch. Also, it sounds more like you are missing the system/hidden files that get put on the drive when you do a format /s.


Mike
 
No Luck. Nothing I tired allows me to boot from the IDE Drive when using only the 3rd party IDE controller. I can boot from a floppy, and accees the IDE drive.
So I flashed my Rev 1 XT-IDE board with the Universal BIOS, and now use that. I can connect the hard drive directly to the XT-IDE of course. But the 3rd party IDE controller also works now with the Universal BIOS present on the XT-IDE. XT-IDE/Universal BIOS - What a great combination!
 
My Type1 piggyback 5170 has four 28-pin ROM sockets. Two are for the even/odd 27256 BIOS chips, two are empty I wonder if a person put an XT-IDE BIOS in one of those empty sockets if it would load and give access to an IDE controller that has no BIOS? Or maybe it would work with the XT-IDE split into even/odd using those empty sockets?
 
RJBJR said:
My Type1 piggyback 5170 has four 28-pin ROM sockets. Two are for the even/odd 27256 BIOS chips, two are empty I wonder if a person put an XT-IDE BIOS in one of those empty sockets if it would load and give access to an IDE controller that has no BIOS? Or maybe it would work with the XT-IDE split into even/odd using those empty sockets?
Click to expand...

Russ,

That's basically the way the Promise cards that gave you a BIOS upgrade for your IDE adapter worked. It was just a ROM on the card. (Maybe a small RAM too to hold custom hard drive parameters.)

You would disable the native BIOS support for hard drives and allow the BIOS extension to run instead. As for the XT-IDE, I think you need the universal BIOS. The new code will have no problem controlling an existing adapter, assuming that the I/O ports are in the standard location.
 
RJBJR said:
I wonder if a person put an XT-IDE BIOS in one of those empty sockets if it would load and give access to an IDE controller that has no BIOS? Or maybe it would work with the XT-IDE split into even/odd using those empty sockets?
Click to expand...

This was done by someone on here recently; the ROM was split into even and odd bytes across two chips as you suggest, and IIRC worked just fine.
 
mbbrutman said:
Russ,

That's basically the way the Promise cards that gave you a BIOS upgrade for your IDE adapter worked. It was just a ROM on the card. (Maybe a small RAM too to hold custom hard drive parameters.)

You would disable the native BIOS support for hard drives and allow the BIOS extension to run instead. As for the XT-IDE, I think you need the universal BIOS. The new code will have no problem controlling an existing adapter, assuming that the I/O ports are in the standard location.
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike, I missed the "universal" part. I thought it might be an answer to the OP's issues since it's the same motherboard. Maybe I'll give it a go and report back after this hurricane thing decides it's course, I'm in prep mode right now.
 
pearce_jj said:
This was done by someone on here recently; the ROM was split into even and odd bytes across two chips as you suggest, and IIRC worked just fine.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I remembered a thread about splitting a BIOS HERE where Chuck(G) posted a link to a file splitting utility( Winhex), I didn't remember seeing splitting the XT-IDE universal BIOS for the 5170, missed that one. I also remember the discussion about using that BIOS in an empty network card BIOS socket. That XT-IDE universal BIOS is a handy universal tool, better than a hammer.

I had to use google to locate the thread you mentioned HERE I wish the forum search worked better.
This would seem to be an alternate solution for bugman2112, if he has the burner and chips. It also takes me off the hook as far as trying it and reporting back :)
 
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