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IDE hard drive in XT computer

RadRacer203

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Since my other projects are now on hold while I find parts, I decided to start on something else. I've been wanting to put an IDE hard drive (maybe a CF card later) in my Amstrad PC1512 so I can hide it inside the case and not take up one of the 2 5.25" bays on the front. I have an NEL 8 bit isa IDE controller (shown) and an old 2gb or so Seagate IDE drive out of some kind of early Windows machine. I also have an XTIDE Universal bios rom chip labelled as revision 580 which I could swap in. The issue I am having is that the universal bios will not recognize the hard drive at all, although it does post and display the text pictured below. With the original chip in the card, it does detect the hard drive, albeit incorrectly, but I get the error message shown below stating that the "hard disk parameter table scratched".
nel.jpg
xtide.jpg
nel bios.jpg
 
I don't know what a NEL 8 bit ISA IDE controller is but this picture shows a Juko controller.

JP2 should be open if using an IDE AT drive.

I doubt that card can support a 2GB drive.
 
I doubt that card is setup to decode the IDE registers at 300h. You need to configure the XT-IDE BIOS image to use the correct port address and whatever I/O scheme that card is using to support a 16-bit wide data register. By default, the XT-IDE BIOS will use a high/low byte interleave scheme to fetch the 16-bit wide data from latches. Though it might have some support for 8-bit only drives (older ones).
 
Ah, ok. So I'll need a different bios image if I want to use this drive. And NEL was the only label anywhere on the card I could see so I assumed that was the manufacturer. I'll see if someone local has an EEPROM programmer I can use to fix it
 
Does XUB even support that Juko controller?
Other than those modern XTIDE/XT-CF/JR-IDE controllers, I can only see support for ADP50L.
 
I just finished validating the ADP50L for XTIDE using a custom build. From the screen error, it looks like this might work though. The trick is to take the BIOS image image on a floppy disk into DOS with the XTIDE Config program. Select the Memory Range you want and save the changes. Then, burn the image and see if it will work.

I don't know much about this device, but its worth checking. Red Racer, send me a PM and I can forward you the images and config program for 8088 and NEC V20 cpus.
 
I just finished validating the ADP50L for XTIDE using a custom build. From the screen error, it looks like this might work though. The trick is to take the BIOS image image on a floppy disk into DOS with the XTIDE Config program. Select the Memory Range you want and save the changes. Then, burn the image and see if it will work.

I don't know much about this device, but its worth checking. Red Racer, send me a PM and I can forward you the images and config program for 8088 and NEC V20 cpus.

Worth a shot, just sent a PM. Fingers crossed it works. I'd love to have an IDE hard drive in this Amstrad, and eventually a CF card. If not I may buy the XTIDE card or just live without a hard drive until I can figure something out
 
I have a PC-1640 working flawlessly with a XT-IDE card and a IDE2CF converter. The CF has 4GB, more space than I'm ever going to need; but hey, it's great to have all this storage available :)

It has a PC-DOS 7 installation and boots really fast, the one and only drawback is the long time the prompt need to get back to you after executing a DIR :-D

Btw, install a NEC V30 in the machine, you'll get a bit more performance. As stated above, the BIOS use specific code and works a little faster.
 
Going off in a totally different direction...but have you considered a parallel port zip drive + palmzip? I went down this route to for my IBM 5150 to equip it with mass storage but I do have an Amstrad 1512HD20 still with the original 20MB RLL hard drive fitted and the zip drive isn't far off the speed of that (when connected to the Amstrad anyway, the CPU running at 8Mhz makes a huge difference vs the 4.77Mhz IBM).

Once that's in place you can just pick up a USB zip drive for your modern PC and have an easy way of moving files to the vintage machine.

You are of course limited to a maximum of 100MB per 'hard disk' but that would have been a ridiculously large drive in the 1512's day anyway and will take quite some filling up when it comes to software the machine can run.
 
I use INTERLNK/SVR and LapLink parallel or serial to connect PCs without HDD to a 486 with a 2GB HDD. This way I have all files centrally. Some software does not work with that solution unfortunately however.
 
I use INTERLNK/SVR and LapLink parallel or serial to connect PCs without HDD to a 486 with a 2GB HDD. This way I have all files centrally. Some software does not work with that solution unfortunately however.
Peter, there's software that utilizes that same parallel cable setup to run a full client/server network and that aforementioned software will most likely work via that network, enabling the PCs without HDDs to fully utilize the 486's 2GB drive.
 
I have the 8bit-IDE XTIDE cards in my 1512 and 1640, along with a pair of 8bit ethernet cards. The only tricky bit was finding a suitable AUI/TP convertor as the old NE1000 cards I got hold of didn't have the TP option on them. With custom drivers some of the 16bit NE2000 clone cards also work on the 1512/1640 (http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?41081-NE2000-Packet-drivers-for-8-bit-slots).

So now I have my machines on the LAN with TCP/IP all is good. I've so far resisted the urge to setup Netware.
 
I have the 8bit-IDE XTIDE cards in my 1512 and 1640, along with a pair of 8bit ethernet cards. The only tricky bit was finding a suitable AUI/TP convertor as the old NE1000 cards I got hold of didn't have the TP option on them. With custom drivers some of the 16bit NE2000 clone cards also work on the 1512/1640 (http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?41081-NE2000-Packet-drivers-for-8-bit-slots).

So now I have my machines on the LAN with TCP/IP all is good. I've so far resisted the urge to setup Netware.

Just out of curiosity, which version of Netware were you tempted to set up?
 
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