• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

XTIDE, Does anyone sell one? Will it work in my situation?

U

uriahsky

Member
Joined
Jan 23, 2012
Messages
37
Forgive me if my post is a bit premature. I am reading about it but I am always in such a rush to get things working that I get a bit bogged down and could use some clarification.

I have a 286 and I replaced the original MFM hard drive with a IDE Controller and am now running into the 504MB barrier and am having trouble with this. Will the XTIDE controller enable me to use a standard IDE drive on my 286? If so, is there anyone who sells one ready to go? If not, I guess my next best choice is a overlay. I can't seem to find Ontrack Disk Manager for DOS. Is it out there somewhere? The only overlay I can find is ANYDRIVE.EXE but the instructions are a little confusing at this point.

3. Run ANYDRIVE 0 <Cyl> <Heads> <Sects> ......
This will create the Master Boot Block and partition the Drive to contain
ONE partition for all of it. The Partition is not activated!

Is it saying to leave CYL, Heads Sects blank or fill them in with the smaller drive selection in step two or ?? Step 2,

2. Configure some smaller Harddrive-Size in the BIOS Setup.

Does anyone have any experience with this program and might have some tips on using it?
Thanks
Russ
 
Yes, I have used ANYDRIVE many times and would be glad help you on it. What ANYDRIVE is telling you to do is to fill in the cylinder, heads, and sectors blanks in with the specifications for the hard drive that you're trying to install. And when ANYDRIVE sets itself into the boot block, it will use the provided drive specifications to communicate with the computer on startup to access the drive. It asks you to configure a smaller HDD size in the BIOS so it can have a basic way to communicate with the hard drive without finding non-existant free space (hence find a smaller size). Once you get the drive going, format, FDISK, and SYS C: the drive.

Follow the instructions carefully, they'll explain everything. (It is a little confusing the first time). Let us know if you need more help.
 
Does your IDE controller have an onboard ROM BIOS that can be removed or disabled?
If the ROM chip itself can be removed, then it could be replaced with a ROM that has the XTIDE universal BIOS installed, and that would break your 502MB barrier.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
Yes, I have used ANYDRIVE many times and would be glad help you on it. What ANYDRIVE is telling you to do is to fill in the cylinder, heads, and sectors blanks in with the specifications for the hard drive that you're trying to install. And when ANYDRIVE sets itself into the boot block, it will use the provided drive specifications to communicate with the computer on startup to access the drive. It asks you to configure a smaller HDD size in the BIOS so it can have a basic way to communicate with the hard drive without finding non-existant free space (hence find a smaller size). Once you get the drive going, format, FDISK, and SYS C: the drive.

Follow the instructions carefully, they'll explain everything. (It is a little confusing the first time). Let us know if you need more help.
Click to expand...

Is there a recommended size drive I should use? I was planning on using a Quantum Fireball St. It has a listing on the front for a bunch of different sizes.

1.8 3128/16/63
2.1 2092/16/63
2.4 4708/16/63
3.2 6225/16/63
4.3 14848/16/63
6.4 13329/16/53

Does it matter which one I use?

Do I need to enter precomp and landing zone, I am not sure what those are.

When I tried to run it with the following I got "no file found"

anydrive 0 <3128><16><63>

I am probably missing the obvious.
Thanks for the help.
Russ

My IDE hard drive card does not have a bios on it. I couldn't seem to find one that works on a ISA or EISA motherboard. Is that what the XTIDE card is for?
 
I've been musing on the idea of making a small and cheap ISA board with just a flash chip on it, for this type of purpose. The xtide-universal BIOS could be loaded in to it. But I'm not sure there is enough demand.
 
Could always develop one and share the eaglecad or whatever files, I might make one or 2 for fun. Always wanted to make my own isa card from scratch! :D
 
I've been looking at this myself (for an unrelated project). There's a sample schematic on page 207 of Lewis C Eggebrecht's 'Interfacing to the IBM Personal Computer' that looks simple to modify.

It's for an addressable SRAM board using a 74LS688 octal comparator for high end address comparison, 2 x 74LS244 buffers for driving the address bus, and a 74LS245 for a bidirectional buffer. It has a group of 4 x 2K SRAM's selected using a 74LS139 (all 5 chips could be replaced with a single 6264 SRAM - add a DS1210 and a battery and you've potentially got something).

I was thinking about a switchable SRAM board for boot ROM development (i.e. with a RO/RW/Disable switch) but there's a bit more logic for that (and I haven't yet made the effort to locate the Eagle parts for the ISA connector).

I've also got a dedicated 8-bit ISA EPROM board (probably a good starting point).

I don't know if I'd fab the board myself - I don't like my chances with double-sided PCB's - and there are others on this forum with some serious background.

Is this another potential collaboration ?
 
Hmm, so maybe this is a goer. I'll draft up a design today and post it later.

It's going to be very simple though, literally just an SST39SF0x0 flash with the 1st 32KB of it mapped into the PC address space between A000 and F800 selectable via a DIP switch block. Bascially the same as the ROM part of the original XT/IDE controller but with a flash chip instead given that 28Cxxx chips are very expensive now. I've already got a programming utility for the chip.
 
uriahsky said:
Is there a recommended size drive I should use? I was planning on using a Quantum Fireball St. It has a listing on the front for a bunch of different sizes.
Click to expand...
Once you find the right settings, then you input them into the ANYDRIVE 0 comand. Once you get the drive going, ANYDRIVE will let you see the whole drive, but use at least MS-DOS 4.01. DOS 3.3 can't go past 32mb.

You've got the list of cylinders/heads/sectors, but I can't figure out what the 1.8, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3, etc... numbers are. Do you see any of those numbers anywhere else on the drive?
 
uriahsky said:
I was planning on using a Quantum Fireball St. It has a listing on the front for a bunch of different sizes.

1.8 3128/16/63
2.1 2092/16/63
2.4 4708/16/63
3.2 6225/16/63
4.3 14848/16/63
6.4 13329/16/53

Does it matter which one I use?
Click to expand...
That list is for different submodels of the Quantum Fireball ST series. You need to find out which model you have.
Do I need to enter precomp and landing zone, I am not sure what those are.
Click to expand...
No, those are for really old drives.
When I tried to run it with the following I got "no file found"

anydrive 0 <3128><16><63>
Click to expand...
That tells DOS to feed the "anydrive 0" command data from the file 3128 (which probably does not exist). ;)
It should have been

anydrive 0 3128 16 63

instead but as I said, you need to know what model you have.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
You've got the list of cylinders/heads/sectors, but I can't figure out what the 1.8, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3, etc... numbers are. Do you see any of those numbers anywhere else on the drive?
Click to expand...

I'm going to assume that you haven't had your first cup of coffee yet? :D
 
uriahsky said:
My IDE hard drive card does not have a bios on it. I couldn't seem to find one that works on a ISA or EISA motherboard. Is that what the XTIDE card is for?
Click to expand...
We're running a lot of topics in this thread, but the XTIDE controller is an 8-bit ISA card, primarily used to give you IDE on your PC/XT class of machines.
In your case, you have a full 16 bit bus, thus you do not need the actual controller (you'd get way less performance than your 16 bit bus would allow for).
All you need is the software (BIOS) that was developed with the XTIDE controller, you load that BIOS onto an EPROM, put that EPROM into a 3COM NIC card, and you're good to go.
Or you buy a generic IDE controller that has better support for your hard drive size. They are not expensive, because you're getting a 16 bit controller.

Topic #2: I won't try to stop anyone from developing new hardware for old machines, but I don't see a need for a drop in card with just an eeprom on it when there is a ready supply of usable NIC cards that you can put a ROM into and still also get NIC support without using any slots up. I suppose the new card would be better for flash upgrades, but that's the only advantage I can see.
 
Krille said:
I'm going to assume that you haven't had your first cup of coffee yet? :D
Click to expand...
Maybe those are different versions of the ST drive, and it lists all the versions on one label (I hate that). Do you see any of those numbers anywhere else on the drive other than the general list of specs?
 
Hargle, it just seems to me there's been a fair few "how do I use the universal BIOS" threads recently, and with the 28c64 chips getting on for £10 each in the UK now, I think we could have an 8-bit board with 1Mb flash on it, complete, for a lot less than that with 4 to 8x the capacity available. Plus not everyone uses a NIC in such old machines.

Actually I was wondering if it could enable PC/XT users, for example, to try different revisions of the IBM BIOS's, by removing altogether the factory BIOS chips. Justa thought anyway :)
 
Hi,
I wonder why the 28C64 chips are so expensive in the UK? The are $3.75 at Jameco in the US and can probably be found for less on eBay.

I think the issue with using a larger memory chip is it will require some kind of address latching if you plan to use the whole chip. Otherwise you'd be restricted to a narrow 8KB to 32KB window to access the ROM just using the lowest memory addresses of the chip. If it gets bigger than 32KB it will start taking up too much ROM space in the upper memory region and be difficult to find a place for it.

While I've seen ROM only ISA boards before they aren't very common. They can be built with only few parts the economics of making a dedicated ROM-only ISA PCB is going to make it difficult to make the project viable at low cost. It would require an impractically large number of boards to recoup the tooling, shipping, production and other costs.

I think the suggestion to use either a NIC or empty motherboard ROM socket is your best bet or repurpose and already existing ISA board with a ROM socket. Just removing unused components from an XT-IDE V2 PCB would lower the costs quite a bit. Using a smaller PCB would also reduce costs but not much since it is already inexpensive.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck! Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch
 
Yes plenty available, but they need an EPROM programmer AFAIK. With flash we can write endlessly within any system with a standard ISA slot. Assuming this would be self-assembly job the PCBs might be about £3 and the components about the same again, plus the assembler would get the satisfaction of making their own simple ISA board, something I think helped make the original XT/IDE such a success :)
 
Im still digging the idea of these simple eprom cards. Since we are talking about the extra space as well, would it be possible to fit/boot msdos off it like a tandy? I own a few 3c503/3c509 cards, but tbh I'll never use networking on my XT's. Seems like a waste of power to me... These eprom cards seem right up my alley! :D
 
Last edited:
It is hard to tell what exact model these drives are. They seemed to have left that insignificant piece of information off of the label, or I am missing the obvious. I put it in a computer and it came up saying it was 3.2gig size. I then ran it with the following format.

anydrive 0 6225 16 63

and I got a message saying that the cylinders should be between 0-2048. Did I do something wrong or is this just a limit on the number of cylinders on anydrive?

I have about forty IDE drives under 10Gig and two that don't have too many cylinders, but both of them are broken.

Do I need to order a smaller drive or are there any other options. I would like something that is robust and reliable and very compatible if possible.
Thanks again for the help. I really appreciate it.
Russ
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top