Enta 486SX / Award V3.20-E Laptop won't work with any IDE drive....

[solidpro]

Hi Everyone

I've been tearing my hair out over this -virtually worthless- 486SX machine. It's a relatively boring laptop but I just wanted to get it working because it has such a lovely keyboard. It was originally cursed with a Conner CP30104H 3.5" IDE hard drive which has totally failed - not because of those rubber bungs inside disintegrating - it's been previously dismantled and is unusable.

Anyway, the BIOS has 48 different 'types' along with a 49th type where you can manually set the configuration - but NOTHING will work. I had a decent old Seagate that worked and manually configured it using the settings on the hard drive's label and still no go.

I've tried IDE->CF card adaptors and picking different types and still no go.

I've tried drive overlay software (like EZ-DRIVE) and still no go.

I'm really just trying to see if anyone has any good ideas, besides buying a similarly awful 'old' (as in, less than 100Mb) drive which will probably also either not work or fail soon after.?




Thanks!

 

[Krille]

It will probably be a challenge as this is a laptop but you might want to look into installing XTIDE Universal BIOS.

 

[Ruud]

I worked with quite some old laptops and PCs and as long you had an HDD that was within range, things worked fine. EXCEPT if something deeper down broke! Specific case: two laptops with identical drives, one would start up with both HDDs, the other one couldn't even detect one.

 

[3lectr1c]

What about ezdrive wasn’t working? It’s worked perfectly for me on another laptop from that company - once it and EzBIOS are installed you have to set the BIOS to TYPE 9.
By the way - that’s a Nan Tan FMA3500 or similar from the looks, rebranded by Enta.

 

[creepingnet]

Ah, another NanTan FMA3500 - this time a FMA3500SX, in the less common gray color. I've had a couple of these, I have a 3500C currently.

First, I'm surprised nobody familiar has mentioned that these don't come with a normal 4-pin molex for desktop hard disks like we are used to in most cases. Both FMA3500 systems I've had had a small 3-pin molex connector used for power to the HDD, with the center being ground. That might be why the Seagate isn't working, did it have that 3-pin connector? If you want to stick with that and leave the laptop stock then you have no choice but to find a HDD with this 3 pin connector on it - those were made by Seagate, Connor, and Maxtor mainley.

Mine is modified with a crimp-on 4-pin molex per below to allow me to use more than just those drives on it...



I scavenged my connector from a dead NEC VersaDock Power Supply, you could also just solder up an adapter as well.

As for HDDs, anything ATA/IDE should work with it assuming the later drives have alternate jumper settings for older computers. Drives starting with the ATA-66 drives don't tend to play well with older hard disk controllers, and the controllers these older NanTan/Kapok laptops have tend to be a bit persnickety about jumper settings, either not appearing, or working kinda-sorta and then failing when certain BIOS calls or other interactions are made that the controller might have trouble with (a bit theoretical really, but that's how I see it). Usually this is done as a master by jumpering the regular pins for "Master" setting and then a second jumper a second set over skipping the next two pins used for slave, or sometimes a 4th set of pins for capacity limiting (which depending on the drive will limit it to 2.1GB or 32GB depending on age and capacity). You'd have to look up the drive to know what the alternate jumpers are.

DDOs

I have successfully used 2 DDOs with the NanTan FMA3500 - OnTrack Disk Manager 9, and Maxtor Maxblast - both of these work regardless of brand of drive. Maxblast I'd suggest for this application because it fits on one Floppy, and you won't really be able to use CD-ROM boot support on this via the DDO (something I do to all of my desktop systems). The two drives I've run in it include a 8.4GB
Seagate ST38411A and a 80GB Western Digital WD800JB with Ontrack 9 on it - both worked flawlessly with the correct jumper settings. All of these larger drives should have the following CHS

TYPE CYLINDERS HEADS SECTORS PRECOMP LANDZONE
49 1024 16 63 0 1024

However, your mileage may vary, I've had some hard disks act a little goofey with this, however that could just have been I did not use the alternate jumpers on it