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Help Buying Parts & Building XT-IDE Rev2 & Lo-Tech ISA CF

Agree with this in principle - it just makes a potential delay in booting since some of the XT-CF lack a PD resistor on the status line. Delays aren't too much of a concern with 1980s PCs though :)

How much of a delay are we talking about? More than what would normally be expected for detecting a slave drive?

Can the BIOS simply be re-built to turn on the slave functionality?

Remove lines 136-139 and 163-175 in DetectDrives.asm and then build the BIOS with whatever options you need.
 
I don't know if this was smart or not. But I put one of my newly built adapters into my 5160 and powered up without the flash chip. Kinda like a "smoke test."

Nothing smoked, and the computer booted.

I played with the XTIDECFG utility. I have one problem. I couldn't read the screens on my CGA display card plugged into a green composite monitor. It really needs some switch or setting to display totally monochrome with no colors at all.
 
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I don't know if this was smart or not. But I put one of my newly built adapters into my 5160 and powered up without the flash chip. Kinda like a "smoke test."

For this purpose, I keep a Pentium system - which is obviously dispensable - just in case!
 
I've built a special R566:

  • Late initialisation not included
  • XT-CF master/slave functionality

XT, XTplus and XTIDECFG all included - Files here. Please post back how (if) it works.
 
Hi pearce... WE meet again :)
Great idea! I tried with cf to ide, dual (master/slave) with lo-tech XTIDE_CF. and the card are correctly found but i never got booted. three card. 128 Mb, 1Gb cf, cf to sd adapter with 1Gb. all 3 Boot in single, but in master/slave configuration seem to Lock up (got also an error, boot sector not found) with all 3 couples.
 
Hmm need to think about this. I'm surprised the SD card adapter works at all. Have you tried any of them sitting alone as slave devices, then booting from alternative source (i.e. floppy) and confirming the device is accessible to DOS?
 
Ok, strangely enough, today is working and booting with 1Gb cf, and 2Gb sd_to_cf cards! In a cheap dual master/slave adapter. All partitions are recognized by Fdisk and working. I used a very short ide cable tris time. WOW finally i can format new hard disk and install SO without floppy. this has to be included in future revision of the official BIOS.
Thank you pearce!
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