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XT-IDE rev 4 Development

I've had a number of people experience corruption issues and other weirdness with various 2.x releases of the XUB, on machines ranging from true blue IBM PCs and XTs to Soviet bloc clones. In 100% of these cases, switching back to v1.1.5 fixed their issues. I advise them to please report here or email the XUB folks directly, whether they do or not, I don't know. Right now, my current recommendation to everyone who buys a kit and asks is start with v1.1.5, and after proving the board out on their system, then consider switching to r591 IF they feel like they need a faster disk controller (Chuck Mod mode) or want serial boot or something.

Thanks for your work, I do appreciate it, and I hope the rest of the community does as well, but I'm not the only one who feels like reported issues are sometimes blown off.
 
glitch said:
Or might introduce random partition corruption now and then. Maybe :) Happy to start shipping these things with newer versions when existing complaints are addressed.

Shouldn't make a difference to the card how LBA translation is being done.

Are you using the ubiquitous black Chinese CF adapters? I've been through dozens of those, and it's been my experience that some work with some cards and others don't work with the same cards. I haven't looked into it too deeply since I mostly use industrial Flash modules nowadays, but I've had other folks report that some of the cheapie adapters use a few diodes in series to effect a 3.3Vish "universal" supply to allow both 3.3V and 5V cards to be used in the same socket with no jumpers.
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Not sure if they are the ubiquitious ones or not. Tomorrow I can pull it and let you know what type it is. It seemed to work ok with my pdp8 sbc. I have several more of the same kind on order as well as two more sandisk cf cards, like the one taht works. i plan to order another XtIde card for my 5155 from you soon.

I do know the cf cards are getting zero'd under linux. Dd if=/dev/zero .... After which I dd the imade back off and see a wiped card. I will change the order of the fdisk /mbr upfront and see if that changes things.

I bought the card from you off ebay a few weeks ago, not sure of the fw version without looking. Do you suggest I flash something newer on it? Or wait for the fix you refered to above?

Len
 
glitch said:
.....Are you using the ubiquitous black Chinese CF adapters?.....
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I've had a couple of the black cheapo crappy Chinese CF adapters fail, On both occasions it resulted in file corruption, I don't buy the cheap Chinese adapters any more.

Also when setting up a CF card or Flash drive from scratch, I don't use DOS to partition and format as i have found it can often get it wrong and can cause error's like " Non system disk or disk error ", " Unable to load operating system " etc or it gets to " Starting MS-DOS... " and hangs for ever. Once the CF card or Flash drive is setup properly and working DOS will happily format the partition and install system files if needed and get it right.
 
glitch said:
I've had a number of people experience corruption issues and other weirdness with various 2.x releases of the XUB, on machines ranging from true blue IBM PCs and XTs to Soviet bloc clones. In 100% of these cases, switching back to v1.1.5 fixed their issues.
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Can you please forward these messages to me (by PM or e-mail)? I would very much like to know every detail regarding any data corruption issues, especially if it involves any of the newer revisions (like r588 and newer). As for "other weirdness", I have a feeling a lot of that comes from people using the beta 3 version from Google Code which really was a dud. Or from using other very old v2 revisions.

I advise them to please report here or email the XUB folks directly, whether they do or not, I don't know. Right now, my current recommendation to everyone who buys a kit and asks is start with v1.1.5, and after proving the board out on their system, then consider switching to r591 IF they feel like they need a faster disk controller (Chuck Mod mode) or want serial boot or something.
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Which means that every second I spend on improving the BIOS is just wasted effort. You could just as well recommend trying the latest version first and IF a problem is found then try using the older v1.1.5 version to rule out hardware problems. That way people won't have to repartition, reformat and reinstall their OS and other software when they decide they want to use their new hardware to its fullest potential.

Thanks for your work, I do appreciate it, and I hope the rest of the community does as well, but I'm not the only one who feels like reported issues are sometimes blown off.
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I have never blown anyone off (LOL) but this is just a hobby so I'm not getting paid to do it and I do have a job which means my free time is limited. With that said, I will ignore people who obviously haven't put even the slightest effort into reading up on the subject. Also, last but not least, sometimes I don't have a clue as to what the problem is and I realize that that might cause some people to think their problem is being ignored.
 
So, I recently snagged a new XT-IDE card for my PC-XT and it's having trouble booting - producing garbage most of the time (but not always) on multiple systems (5160 and 5170 respectively) when trying to boot off media my PC-AT's XT-IDE ROMs handle with gusto. Any troubleshooting pointers? It doesn't seem to be an address conflict and since the card was bought assembled I can likely assume it's configured properly.
 
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Based on your screenshot, I'm guessing you have an older XUB flashed on your card, which supported the media differently than the newer XUB. If your media was formatted with the newer one, it won't read in the older one. Have you tried setting up your media from scratch? (boot from a boot disk, fdisk /mbr, fdisk, format c: /s)
 
Yup... Sadly it won't boot most of the time even when set up natively. Media's known to boot fine on my previous foray with XT-IDE ROMs, my PC-AT. Conflicts have all been ruled out. Glitch is sending me a known good minimal boot card for testing purposes.
 
Yup! Swapped 'em out while trying to see if i could get it to play ball with a Boca IDE Plus alone. That alone didn't do it, sadly, but XT-IDE ROMs as a supplement worked excellently!
 
MrArgent said:
Yup... Sadly it won't boot most of the time even when set up natively. Media's known to boot fine on my previous foray with XT-IDE ROMs, my PC-AT. Conflicts have all been ruled out. Glitch is sending me a known good minimal boot card for testing purposes.
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I've had similar problems in the past with my 5160 using CF, Sometimes it would boot fine and others it wouldn't and garbage was displayed on the screen, It turned out to be the cheap chinese CF adapter i was using, A new cf adapter solved the problem.
 
Malc said:
I've had similar problems in the past with my 5160 using CF, Sometimes it would boot fine and others it wouldn't and garbage was displayed on the screen, It turned out to be the cheap chinese CF adapter i was using, A new cf adapter solved the problem.
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Yeah, we'd been discussing this on IRC and that seems to be the common link between them, since they're good quality CF cards. I've sent him a 64 MB DOM to test with.
 
There a more reliable brand out there I can work with? I like the convenience of being able to just sneakernet the card over to my desktop to drop files in it when i need to, which is why i haven't looked too closely into DOMs or traditional IDE disks yet.
 
I've had good luck with [ these ], I've got several which i've had for a few years now and not had any problems, And more recently about 6 months or so i got a couple of [ these ], I also like these
s-l1600.jpg
Opinions vary greatly though.
 
I'm working on a converter that'll replace the metal bracket on the XT-IDE and add an externally accessible CF slot. It should work on any of the XT-IDE revisions that use the Keystone metal bracket (including the Lo-Tech boards that use it). Partly because I think it'll be fun to design/build, partly because I'm tired of having to order 5 or so CF adapters to ensure I get one definitely working one for day-job projects!

I've had good luck with the StarTech 3.5" bay converters, but that probably won't work for your needs.
 
That'll be handy, Will it be possible to still have 2 drives, 1 internal and 1 external
 
Excellent, I look forward to seeing it, I assume the R4 XT-IDE and new CF adapter can occupy the same slot space, ie: slot 8 in an XT
 
I'm in the process of equipping my 5160 with two CF card holders mounted in the right hand drive bay. The final setup will have two IDE-CF adapters mounted in 3.5 inch holders which are in turn mounted in 3.5 inch to 5.25 inch drive bay adapters. In the process I've had one heck of a time finding IDE-CF adapters that will function as the slave drive in a standard IDE master/slave setup. Neither of my IDE-CF cards, one from Lo-Tech and one from Glitch Works, recognized any CF card I put in an Addonics IDE-CF adapter. Syba IDE-CF adapters worked fine as a master but identified any CF card as master regardless of whether the adapter's option jumper was set to master, slave, or removed entirely. I was able to verify that the IDE-CF adapters marked HXP-2108P worked as either master or slave with two adapters on the cable provided that I used quality CF cards that were formatted properly.

https://www.adverts.ie/other-cables...e-ata-39-pin-adapter-converter-40-pin/1469803

Then my 5160 let out the magic smoke and I've had to put that particular project to the side.

I hope this will help anyone going down the path I'm on.
 
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Got myself a 60gb Maxtor drive of (Relatively) recent manufacture as a known quantity for diagnostic purposes; unfortunately it seems to be having the same issues my 64mb cF card does in spite of my usual WIPEDISK, FDISK and FORMAT /s process passing muster. Dang.
 
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