DTC 515BX MFM Controller + ST225

[mAJORD]

Hi Guys

I'm trying to get a Seagate St-225 working with one of these cards, on a circa-1989-1990 286 Motherboard, with an American Megatrends BIOS.

I'm wondering if anyone has the DIP switch settings for the BXD06 BIOS? I could only find the BD05 on Stason.

and another question if I may.. Since the M/board BIOS has configurable HDD settings, should I do this here, and disable the BIOS on the card? I did actually try this but no joy!

Thanks all

 

[Chuck(G)]

Just so happens that I have the manual for the DTC5150BX BXD6 BIOS revision.

If this is your only drive on the controller set the switches as follows:

Sw 1->10101111 (X = Don't care, 1 = on, 0 = 0ff)

The funny thing about the BXD6 BIOS is that you can't set switches 1256 off, or else the BIOS will think that you're trying to split the primary drive to be two 10MB drives. Strange but true. If there's only one drive you have to set both sets (3478 and 1256) to the same thing.

You can't use the motherboard BIOS to access the drive. This is an XT-style controller and will not work with AT-style routines.

Further, make sure that I/O addresses 320-32F are unused by any other peripheral and that segments C800->C9FF aren't being used by other device BIOS extensions.

As I said, the DTC5150BX is an XT controller, but you might get it to work.

If I wasn't clear, you want to disable the motherboard hard drive BIOS support.

 

[mAJORD]

Thanks very much for the reply Chuck.

I tried those settings, but no joy unfortunatly. The Card came out of a supposedly working Xt clone (with a baby AT XT board in it) , but was attached to a Tandon drive. I think perhaps this 286 board is just too modern. It actually reverts to looking for ROM BASIC after going through POST.

time to find a more modern controller I think

 

[mAJORD]

Success!!

Chuck If I could man-hug you from here I would. Thank you!

My problems ended after setting the drive to daisy chain, and performing a Low -Level format on it.

I guess I wrongly assumed since it had been booting before it would "just work" with a different controller

Now happily running DOS 3.3. So I guess that means, yes the 515BX runs fine on at least this 'newer' AT class board