mikey99, do you happen to know if your BIOS is also the same "Special Integrated Designs Co" OEM?
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I'm fairly certain that mine contains a standard BIOS, probably an ERSO. I haven't booted this system in awhile.
mikey99, do you happen to know if your BIOS is also the same "Special Integrated Designs Co" OEM?
......
Have you got the hole with out the write protect slider covered up? What are you using to try and format them?(and another thing - before this I tried to see if I can have it boot from a 720K floppy - but none of my 3.5"/1.44M floppies would allow to be formatted as 720K, and I don't have any DD floppies. Bummer.)
Your microdrive may have a non-standard boot sector.But it doesn't boot from it even with the OS properly transferred. After the boot menu where I select which drive I want to boot from, if I choose the floppy it boots. If I choose the HDD, it hangs at "booting C>>C"
USE!UMBS.SYS is an Upper Memory Block Manager for PC/XT/ATs. That should work nicely.
You should try the USE!UMBS.SYS program. It comes with a utility that will let you know immediately if you can gain anything from it.
I remember having a similar problem with REMM.SYS. I think it's the later versions that support LIM4.0 that don't work very well. I can't remember which version I eventually settled on, but I know it was not v4.70. It was either a very late v3.x or an earlier version of v4.x
I'll be on the road for the next month, so I unfortunately I can't check it for you.
I've abandoned the microdrive because it acts weirdly. I think it may not be properly supported by the XTIDE universal BIOS. Instead I dug out an old 64MB CF card, which this system can format to full capacity and boots fine.
The 6 GB Hitachi microdrives are definitely supported. I know Tomi (aitotat) use them and he even recommends using them in the manual.
Did you make the BIOS from the latest revision? What build options did you use when building it? What (if any) configuration changes did you do with XTIDECFG?
DEFINES_XTCUSTOM = MODULE_8BIT_IDE MODULE_8BIT_IDE_ADVANCED MODULE_COMPATIBLE_TABLES MODULE_BOOT_MENU MODULE_EBIOS MODULE_IRQ MODULE_STRINGS_COMPRESSED ELIMINATE_CGA_SNOW RESERVE_DIAGNOSTIC_CYLINDER MODULE_POWER_MANAGEMENT
I did. It doesn't find any usable UMBs. It's one of the programs that I mentioned in my earlier post that "can't find or use" upper memory. Others that I've tried, also without success, were Hiram.exe and one called The Last Byte.
Have you tried QRAM?
I have not tried QRAM, but I don't expect that it will find usable RAM where there is none.