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HeadStart Explorer and XT-IDE v1.0

OK, I have some news here: turns out the PRESS F1 message shows up with the EPROMs installed as well. But I don't think it's related, I get this message when a harddisk is connected to the controller, even when there's no power connected to the harddisk. Just having a harddisk with flatcable connected to the controller gives the PRESS F1. Is that weird... Or what? ;-)

I'm using an 80-pin ATA cable btw. Cable is tested good.
 
I want to say that just hooking a drive up without power, causes the machine to behave differently is an electrical+logical impossibility- the IDE interface is physically located on the hard drive. If there's no power, the IO space can't decode and thus those IO cycles would be just like not having a drive attached at all.
Of course, we're talking about a headstart machine here, where all logic and impossibilities are thrown out the window.

how much memory is in this HS machine?

I have a few more ideas for things to play with in the BIOS, but I'm crazy busy at the moment. later in the week I will have a few more roms to try.
 
Yeah I know and agree... [x-files mode]But I know what I saw[/x-files mode] ;-) I really had just the power connector off the drive (and that would be the same as no drive attached) and got the PRESS F1 message. After I also disconnected the flatcable off the XT-IDE controller the PRESS F1 was gone and I could boot to floppy disk. I know, long shot but could it maybe be that one or more pins on the controllers flatcable header are shorting?? Not that I question the guy who made it, and I haven't checked, but could this end up in this kind of weird behaviour?

I'm off from tomorrow until next week as well, won't be home so nothing to do with the HeadStart until then... and I picked up a nice PS/2 Model 30 286 with 30MB harddisk yesterday and still have cleaning that one on my list too (man I need a vacation, so much stuff to do, so little time) ;-)

Oh yeah, I think there is 512K in the machine btw. There's 256 on board and 256 more on a little card that goes into a slot.
 
I do wonder if there is still an IO conflict between the XTIDE and the HS machine. How about the following test:

1) pull the jumper that enables the eeprom. Let's get the BIOS completely out of the way for now. (or pull the ROM chip)
2) attach a HDD+cable+power to the card. Does the F1 show up?
3) Does it show up at all 16 possible IO settings you can select?

Your patience in this matter is bordering on legendary. I'd have thrown this machine out the window by now.
 
With the BIOS jumper on:

At address C0000-C1FFF: no boot, black screen and no HeadStart logo or nothing
At address C4000-C5FFF: no boot, but one neep and one solid cursor underside of the screen
At address C8000-C9FFF: boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address CC000-CDFFF: boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address D0000-D1FFF: boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address D4000-D5FFF boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address D8000-D9FFF boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address DC000-DDFFF: boot, and it boots to the DOS ROM without looking for a floppy
At address E0000-E1FFF: boot and into the DOS ROM without looking for a floppy
At address E4000-E5FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address E8000-E9FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address EC000-EDFFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address F0000-F1FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address F4000-F5FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address F8000-F9FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address FC000-FDFFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy

Floppy is a DOS 5.0 boot floppy btw, and it won't even check if there is anything in the drive.
 
Denniske1976 said:
Well, with the BIOS jumper off and a harddisk connected it boots to the EEPROM with DOS 3.31 (for some weird reason not to floppy).
Click to expand...
This is a problem that we have to fix first. I think the XTIDE's IO space is conflicting with the floppy controller somehow. I assume that if you take the XTIDE out completely, that the floppy drive seeks and boots.


I was trying to get you to try all 16 IO addresses without the BIOS jumper enabled.
1) pull the jumper that enables the eeprom. Let's get the BIOS completely out of the way for now. (or pull the ROM chip)
2) attach a HDD+cable+power to the card. Does the F1 show up? Will it seek a floppy and boot to it? (if so stop! we've found our winner)
3) Does it show up at all 16 possible IO settings you can select?

We need to see if one of the 16 IO addresses allow your floppy to start working again.

The other work you did, of testing all 16 BIOS addresses, is still good work. We will reference that later.
 
OH like that... well, with the BIOS jumper off the thing boots normally on every address. Tried that some time ago. It seems that the card is not found at all then, or at least it skips the menu etc (seems logical). It then indeed just boots to the floppy again... but no harddisk is found when I debug -d 40:75.

With the BIOS jumper off, address CC000 works normally... I can boot to floppy and flash every other BIOS from that. Just no harddisk found with debug and if I remove the floppy it boots into the DOS ROM as expected. BUt like I said, every I/O address works with the jumper off. It's just with the jumper on that everything holds to a "PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE..." and all these F1 messages don't do anything after I press F1, so I guess this is coming from the DOS ROMs maybe? Because it either boots into those directly, or it won't and shows an F1 message.

I had been using the default 300h and the CC000 address all the time until now btw, that's where I can flash every BIOS version in the controller without problems. D0000 also works. Some addresses won't work, but all the address settings boot to floppy with the jumper off (that's why it seems to me the card is just not found). And also: with the card in, jumper on and on address 300h/CC000, but with NO harddisk connected I get the F1 message (so it's not connection related as I had figured before).

What a *(^(&%$*)(*()%$ pain in the *ss!! Those HeadStart machines (because it also didn't work in the HeadStart II)... so much for being "IBM Compatible" ;-)
 
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Denniske1976 said:
OH like that... well, with the BIOS jumper off the thing boots normally on every address. Tried that some time ago. It seems that the card is not found at all then, or at least it skips the menu etc (seems logical). It then indeed just boots to the floppy again... but no harddisk is found when I debug -d 40:75.
Click to expand...
Correct. without the BIOS you will get no menu, no HDD discovered, no 40:75 being updated. BUT, even without the BIOS, the IO range is still being decoded by the card+drive. So the HDD is there, but no software (BIOS) is talking to it. That all makes sense.


It's just with the jumper on that everything holds to a "PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE..." and all these F1 messages don't do anything after I press F1, so I guess this is coming from the DOS ROMs maybe? Because it either boots into those directly, or it won't and shows an F1 message.
Click to expand...
from your work earlier, it looks like some addresses do not throw the F1 error:
At address C0000-C1FFF: no boot, black screen and no HeadStart logo or nothing
At address C4000-C5FFF: no boot, but one neep and one solid cursor underside of the screen
At address C8000-C9FFF: boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address CC000-CDFFF: boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address D0000-D1FFF: boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address D4000-D5FFF boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address D8000-D9FFF boot, and PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE...
At address DC000-DDFFF: boot, and it boots to the DOS ROM without looking for a floppy
At address E0000-E1FFF: boot and into the DOS ROM without looking for a floppy
At address E4000-E5FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address E8000-E9FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address EC000-EDFFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address F0000-F1FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address F4000-F5FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address F8000-F9FFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
At address FC000-FDFFF: boot and into DOS ROM without seeking floppy
Click to expand...
Or did you just get tired writing "PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE" for address E000-FC00?

I think I would suggest moving the BIOS settings to E000. If you can set it there, IO address 300, have a HDD attached and the BIOS jumper enabled AND you can actually boot to the ROM DOS, that gets us further than we've gotten before. We can figure out why the floppy doesn't work at a later time. (I suspect the BIOS hooking int 13h and moving it to int 40h is why)
 
No you are correct, just the C0000 up to D8000 range throw the F1 error, after that the system boots to the DOS ROM. It just skips pooling for a bootable floppy...

I'll try the 300h/E0000 setting and let you know here. I'm still using your BIOS btw, not the XT-IDE BIOS v1.5.0, I'm supposed to use yours right?
 
yeah, keep using mine for the moment.

I now think there is some floppy interface issue with my BIOS. EIther the fact that I hook INT 40h and use it for floppy, or I'm clobbering status/flags whenever floppy INT 13h is called by the HS BIOS. I'm not too terribly worried about that at this time, I just want to see the machine ID a drive and let you boot (to DOS ROM) so we can play around a bit more and find out what to fix next.

So if you can set your card to E000+300, with a connected a HDD and BIOS enabled, AND get to a ROM based DOS prompt, I think the tide will turn in our favor.
(good luck!)
 
I think there's another problem with this machine, I took out the XT-IDE card and now it also won't look for a floppy disk and boots right into the DOS ROM. I thought about trying this because with the BIOS jumper on I don't get the drive menu anymore... Weird.
 
OK, I think I'm going to give up on this. I've just put the card in my HeadStart LX-40 and it works without Any problems, even the menu isn't garbled. I think I'll keep it for when my MiniScribe dies...
 
Weird stuff again, your 0.11 BIOS works: it shows what drive is connected, I can FDISK a partition, format it, transfer the system and boot. But after booting it shows MS-DOS version 5.0 and it garbles up and no prompt shows.

BIOS versions 1.5.0 and 2.0.0 won't work at all, no menu shows, no disk found by FDISK etc. But it does boot from floppy.

On my HeadStart LX-40, I mean...
 
What I also discovered:

Normally when my HeadStart boots, it shows both a "640K RAM Memory found" and another "128K RAM Buffer found" on screen (not the shadow RAM message as I thought, my bad). With the XT-IDE controller in the machine, it also shows both messages, but the latter one now read "0K RAM Buffer found". Does the XT-IDE controller somehow use this memory, or does it just happen to use the memory pointing to that extra 128K (or how do you say that?). The card is still set for 300h/E000 and since my Seagate ST351A/X drives seem to not be working (they're only found as 20MB drives, not 40MB), this card will probably be my backup for when that MiniScribe dies.

But again, from the 1.5.0 BIOS and 2.0.0 BIOS there's no menu, from you 0.11 BIOS I can see a menu (and it even stays on screen for about 5 seconds and is perfectly readable, drive 0 is what I have connected and drive 1 is empty).
 
i'm not sure where that extra memory exists in the machine, so it is difficult to say exactly what is going on. It turns out that my 11 bios does not in fact steal 1k of memory off the top of 640k, but instead I arbitrarily use some memory at 126k just to receive the data coming back from the drive identification. The XTIDE doesn't steal any base memory, aside from the interrupt vector table, where the drive parameters have to be saved in order to pass them on to FDISK. These parameters are 16 bytes per drive, and they are stored inside the vector table, consuming interrupt vectors A0-AF. (normally used by ROM basic)

It's possible that the extra ram is located in the same spot our xtide BIOS now resides (e000h) You could try moving it again to see if that memory range comes back during post, or perhaps something in the HS machine is also trying to use interrupts A0-AF.
You could remove the card and dump out memory (with debug) at 0:0 through 0:400, specifically memory from 0:280 up through 0:2b0. If that range of memory appears to be anything other than a 4 byte repeating pattern, then someone else is using it already.


For your boot issue, you might try issuing "fdisk /mbr" or scan your drive as you may have a virus.
 
Well... latest status update, Sir :)

I have the controller in my HeadStart LX-40. There's still some issues but you could say it works now (YAY!). Here's the deal:

I have version 0.11HS flashed now and that's the one that I can get working. I even get the menu at boot. Settings are 300h/CC00h otherwise it will either lock up the machine, show that the "RAM Buffer" is 0K in stead of 128K or it will show "Press ESC for boot menu" and after that it keeps looking for a disk in drive B: for some reason. Anyhoo, 300h/CC00h and it works with a 40GB Maxtor harddisk connected, I even FDISKed a 40MB partition and can boot from that.

Issue 1: When I use a CF card on an adapter, the card is found (although, no ID string), I can also FDISK a 40Meg partition... but after a reboot the partition is gone.

Issue 2: At the first boot of the PC, let's say when the harddisk hasn't spun up yet, the BIOS shows no drive installed for drive 0 and drive 1. If I CTRL+ALT+DEL, so a reboot without power loss, then the harddisk is detected as a Maxtor and everything works (otherwise, logically, I get no harddisk). The CF doesn't have this problem BTW (although it's erased after a reboot, but since it's ready in a short time I guess this is successfully polled at boot??). Since I've ordered 2 64MB DOMs (Disk On Module) that I plan on using, I guess this won't be a problem... I just hope those aren't loosing the partition after a reboot (soft or hard, as the CF does).

Issue 2: WHen I use the v1.1.5 BIOS, I can't use anything at all, no disks are found, the CF won't work either. No menu shows at boot, and when booting the boot screen stays on screen for about 30secs and then it will beep and continue with reading drive A. I can see the BIOS with debug at CC00 but no harddisk/CF.
 
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