Universal BIOS on 386 system not booting to CF card or HDD

[geiger9]

Hi all. I recently got the Universal BIOS kind of working on my 3com NIC. I downloaded the 8kb 386 prebuilt binary, concatenated it four times to fill up the 32kb EEPROM, loaded it into the XTIDECFG utility, hit autoconfig, then saved it.

Spoiler

The system still tries to boot from it's own BIOS. Just in case it is relevant, here is a picture of the BIOS. When I turn on the system it appears to do nothing until I hit Ctrl+alt+enter to bring up a prompt where I type "setup" to get into this screen. When I exit, that's when it will load the XUB but as you can see in the screenshot below, it just gives me a "j". No keystrokes work. Also it identifies my storage device as the slave. The jumper is not on the CF adapter so it should be reporting as master. I'm not sure if it matters but the IDE ribbon cable only two connections - one for the motherboard and one for a drive. I WAS able to load the DOS 6.22 installer from a floppy drive and install it onto the CF card while it was installed in this system. Also the XUB won't boot from the mechanical HDD either. The HDD DOES boot when I use the stock BIOS for this computer.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

Spoiler

 

[Krille]

I downloaded the 8kb 386 prebuilt binary, concatenated it four times to fill up the 32kb EEPROM, loaded it into the XTIDECFG utility, hit autoconfig, then saved it.

You configured the XUB and saved it to file first, then you concatenated four copies of that configured file, right?

BTW, I can't see the images. But the 'j' appearing means that you need to wipe the drive and redo the partition/format/install dance.

The system still tries to boot from it's own BIOS. Just in case it is relevant, here is a picture of the BIOS. When I turn on the system it appears to do nothing until I hit Ctrl+alt+enter to bring up a prompt where I type "setup" to get into this screen. When I exit, that's when it will load the XUB but as you can see in the screenshot below, it just gives me a "j". No keystrokes work.

You also need to set the drives to None in the system BIOS to avoid it trying to boot from the drive.

Also it identifies my storage device as the slave. The jumper is not on the CF adapter so it should be reporting as master. I'm not sure if it matters but the IDE ribbon cable only two connections - one for the motherboard and one for a drive. I WAS able to load the DOS 6.22 installer from a floppy drive and install it onto the CF card while it was installed in this system.

This makes me a bit worried. You might have a hardware problem somewhere if the drive is detected as slave when it should be master. What happens if you install the jumper on the CF adapter? BTW, only two connectors on the IDE cable is normal and perfectly fine.

Also the XUB won't boot from the mechanical HDD either. The HDD DOES boot when I use the stock BIOS for this computer.

Likely because the stock BIOS is using a different CHS geometry than the XUB. Again, repartitioning and reformatting should fix that too.

 

[geiger9]

I installed the jumper on the CF adapter and now it solved both problems - it now goes directly into the XUB without the need to enter the stock BIOS first and also it recognizes the CF adapter as Master. I feel humbled haha. It was an obvious thing to try and sorry I did not try before posting. Thank you very much for your help! XUB is great!

 

[Krille]

Thank you! I'm glad you got it working!