Shadow Lord
Veteran Member
Isn't it pretty much true that any system made since the 5150 has a floppy driver as part of the BIOS? What I'm wondering is if the default is 1.2MB 5.25". This could result in a boot from a 1.44MB drive to foul up.
Just a theory.
As always Chuck(G) is on the right track. Problem was this is my first EISA system. The BIOS has no del/f1 option to get into it because EVERYTHING is done through the ECU including setting the HDD type and FDD types. Just like the ECU sets "options" on the EISA cards (IRQs, DMA, etc), the motherboard presents itself w/ options which include FDD, HDD, enabling ports, etc.... The BIOS defaulted to 1.2MB FDD switching it to 1.44 resolved the issue. What I don't understand is why it would boot the first time (before the NVRAM cfg was saved) if the default is 1.2? Could it just check different types until it found one that worked?
I also tried a different version of the ECU (an older one) and it seemed to work better (i.e. it told me what cards were populating what slots). Interestingly after using the older ECU to setup the system the AMI ECU fails to work. I am going to have to play around w/ the different ECUs to see which works best. The later revisions seem to have less functionality (i.e. 1.10 has a separate utility to set date/time, keyboard parameters, CMOS password all of which seem to be missing from 2.07)
However, I continue to have problems w/ running the ECU off the floppy as it continues to for the system configuration disk when I run the sd.exe utility.