ineverland
Experienced Member
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2011
- Messages
- 57
Some fairly rough hacking to the ISA-CF has yielded this.
View attachment 25969
cool!
Some fairly rough hacking to the ISA-CF has yielded this.
View attachment 25969
Some fairly rough hacking to the ISA-CF has yielded this.
View attachment 25969
Hi everyone,thanks for your help,I finaly connected a 3.5" floppy drive to 5160,and it can boot from a 720k floppy disk now.I also add the CH375 dos driver to config.sys,and remove the bios rom from the card. After reboot it works great. Usb stick can be accessed as C: drive.See this page on Modem7's site re: booting from 720k, I just had a quick look in the zip that pietja posted and in the readme it states that ch375dos.sys supports DOS 3.x to 7.x
Yes,open source BIOS would be better.I think is better to have an real open source bios for this chip.
The datasheet should be the main source of information and the code you got from the developer should only be used if the datasheet is unclear.
This is how you can mod the card so the address decoder works.
It involves soldering 1 74LS11 chip to the card.
View attachment 25936
If the bios provided by the manufacturer works with the 8088 and 8086 you still need to change a few bytes in the bios if you want to use it on a different i/o address but that is all mentioned in the readme.
Non-System disk or disk error
Replace and press any key when ready
C: Floppy Drive, 3.5" 1.44M
265 Cylinders, 64 Heads
C: Floppy Drive
1 Cylinders
C: Fixed Disk, CMOS Type 0
489 Cylinders, 8 Heads
512 Bytes/Sector, 32 Sectors/Track
CMOS Fixed Disk Parameters
306 Cylinders, 4 Heads
17 Sectors/Track
I have got the same card recently and did a bit of testing with it.
First of it came without a mounting bracket, so i made one myself out of a sheet of stainless steel.
Attached is a pdf file you can use to make your own bracket. Inside the pdf is also the original eagle file.
View attachment 27107
For testing the card i used my two oldest PC's, the Olivetti M24 and Tandon TM 7305 (80286-12).
I used the v1.3 bios on a network card and the v1.9 driver for the testing.
The usb drive i used is the CF card from the corresponding system in a CF to USB adapter.
On the Olivetti the CH375 bios would display the famous error (or in another language depending of the bootsector on the disc)
After pressing enter the CH375 bios is loaded again with the same error, so you are stuck in a never ending loop.Code:Non-System disk or disk error Replace and press any key when ready
Booting the Olivetti without the bios from a floppy with the driver works fine.
The only strange part was that if i used the CF from the 286 with the Olivetti is that it would fill the screen with numbers counting up if the Olivetti was running with a 8086.
If i relapsed it with an NEC V30 it would do the "normal" boot loop, but that has more to do with the bootsector i guess.
Testing with the 286 also give the same Non-System disk error but after pressing enter the systems boots successfully from the usb drive, or displays the boot select menu depending on the setting in the system bios.
I have also run Microsoft Diagnostics on both systems.
On the Olivetti the usb drive is detected as followed when using the driver:
Code:C: Floppy Drive, 3.5" 1.44M 265 Cylinders, 64 Heads
And on the 286 with the driver as:
Code:C: Floppy Drive 1 Cylinders
Using the bios on the 286 gives this:
Code:C: Fixed Disk, CMOS Type 0 489 Cylinders, 8 Heads 512 Bytes/Sector, 32 Sectors/Track CMOS Fixed Disk Parameters 306 Cylinders, 4 Heads 17 Sectors/Track
Using the bios and driver at the same time results in two driver letters in dos, both going to the usb drive without problems.
So in the end i still don't know why de bios wont work in an Olivetti or a 5160.
I could not get the v1.5 bios to work because of the "Press CTRL to start E-DISK" issue.
If you have a working v1.5 bios i would like to see if that makes a different but i don't have much hope for it.
Out of interest what flash drives have you tried, Have you tried any smaller ie: 2 gig and less ?
I used a 16MB (Olivetti) and a 64MB (286) CF card that have been formatted on a XT-IDE controller.Out of interest what flash drives have you tried, Have you tried any smaller ie: 2 gig and less ?
I used a 16MB (Olivetti) and a 64MB (286) CF card that have been formatted on a XT-IDE controller.
They both have the boot sector written using fdisk on MS-DOS 6.22 (The OS on those cards).