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XTIDE Universal BIOS v2.0.0 beta testing thread

Yes working fine with r521, Thanks

I'm not sure what caused this. I didn't have any problems with Master and Slave Drive combination but I did not try with only one drive. I tweaked the reset a bit more and tested on two different systems without problems. I hope it now works.
 
I have discovered that I can use a Sandisk CF/IDE converter with the Western Digital 9.06 overlay in place of less than 528MB hard drives.
I am also going to try the IDE to SATA converter adapters and a Western Digital 500GB SATA hard drive with the WD overlay to see if that will work as well.
Either of these will solve my problem w/o having to figure out why I have conflicts with the use of XTIDE and the machine's application software.

Thanks for the help.
 
I noticed my 486 DX2 66 box is taking longer to boot up, at first i thought it was my imagination but today i was actually sat staring at the screen when i switched it on, XTIDE Bios detects the drive fine but then takes about 20 seconds to get to "Booting C:", Likewise if i have the A: drive as the first boot drive it's the same. I rebuilt the bios using the "Boot_Menu" instead of the "HotKey Bar" and it takes about 20 seconds for the boot menu to pop up after drive detection, This is with r523 bios. I reverted back to r511 and boot up was much faster almost instant, Could this be due to the hotkey bar delay fix ?
 
I have discovered that I can use a Sandisk CF/IDE converter with the Western Digital 9.06 overlay in place of less than 528MB hard drives.
I am also going to try the IDE to SATA converter adapters and a Western Digital 500GB SATA hard drive with the WD overlay to see if that will work as well.
Either of these will solve my problem w/o having to figure out why I have conflicts with the use of XTIDE and the machine's application software.

Thanks for the help.

I would not be surprised if EZ-Drive doesn't go beyond 128GB (48bit LBA addressing limit). FWIW, new PATA drives in the 80-160GB range are still being made new, but sell for a high price compared to 500GB drives.
 
Updated to r524 and my 486 box is happy again :) much better, I raised the "minimum time to display hotkeys" to 5 seconds as 2 seconds was too short and 5 seem's to be a happy medium on this box.

Going back a bit to the "old" configurator there was an option to "Hide Rom Boot" are there any plans to bring this option back ? i thought it was a good option to have.

Thanks

I noticed my 486 DX2 66 box is taking longer to boot up
 
This question is probably for aitotat and pearce_jj.

I've been testing my version of XT-CF-Lite board. It does work with BIOS from James's site using two CF cards: a TOPRAM 4GB card and Kodak 32MB card. But I have several issues and questions:

1. What is XTIDE Universal BIOS version the James's BIOS is based on? What are the modifications? Is there a patch (or a modified source code) available?
2. James's BIOS doesn't work with Transcend 133x 4GB and 8GB CF cards. These cards don't get detected at all. BIOS prints "not found" very quickly. Cards model numbers are TS4GCF133 and TS8GCF133 respectively. The datasheet is available here.
3. XTIDE Universal BIOS 2.0.0b3 doesn't detect any cards at all. I configured it as XT-CF / PIO mode. I also tried to configure 2.0.0b2 BIOS, but apparently it doesn't support XT-CF-Lite at all. With 2.0.0b3 it takes BIOS about 10 seconds to print "not found".
4. At least the James's BIOS looks for secondary drive which is not available/not supported on XT-CF board. This is causes some delay during the boot. It not impossible that some later versions will support two cards, so it would be nice to make "look for the secondary drive" a configuration option.

Thanks,
Sergey
 
I've not looked at the BIOS (or the PCB) for a while - time has been a real problem. But the board is very simple; it just needs the BIOS configured as:

  • Address lines CF A[0..2] mapped to ISA A[1..3] (this is the XT-CF mode of operation)
  • IO Port base address per board, usually 300h

The date stamp on the BIOS is 2012-10-07 so probably it's quite old, I'll see if I still have the source. I did a lot of testing around R427-ish.

For the purposes of testing, work with 8-bit transfers (IN AL,DX), and move to 16-biit once proven. Some systems have issues with the BIU implementation that can result in reversed byte ordering when using that trick.

BTW I realised that the pull-down resistor on D7 might be inappropriate on the lite board, since there is no buffer. It's purpose is to aid detection of an absent device (i.e. slave) so should probably be removed and the BIOS updated accordingly to only look for master for these cards.

Will see if I can find any more info later. For the cards that don't work, see if you can manually pull the device ID data from the cards - I think Tomi has just such a utility available. Provided they support 8-bit transfers (which they must), they should work OK.
 
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The BIOS on my site seems to be R476. Most likely I modified it to not check XT-CF status register (an XT-CFv2 feature that has been removed in the lite and the V3) and instead just use 8-bit port-mapped IO.
 
James, can you please send me a diff, or just all the source code with your modifications? Thanks...

Sorry, I can't find the source code. At some point I'll get on to revising a newer build to suit.
 
Quick question - are there any specific 16-bit ISA controllers out there that are known to work decently well in an 8-bit slot with this BIOS? (I'm led to believe that this would be a working setup to drive a CF card, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)
 
1. What is XTIDE Universal BIOS version the James's BIOS is based on? What are the modifications? Is there a patch (or a modified source code) available?

I've started work on r528 for XT-CFv3 and XT-CF-lite support. The existing official XTIDE Universal BIOS *will not work* under adapter type 'XT-CF' for these boards, since neither has a readable control register (an XT-CFv2 feature) which is used in initialisation, determining transfer type and auto-detection. I'll continue work this week and feed the revisions back to Tomi when I can.
 
Hi aitotat. Now as we have new XT-FDC board with support for up to 4 FDDs there seems to be a new problem with booting discovered. I have described it already in XT-FDC thread.

archeocomp said:
Hi all. I have just finished two XT-FDC boards. They work fine in my TurboXT taiwanese board with Super Turbo 2.5 Plasma's BIOS. I have a problem though. It might be XT-IDE BIOS related (I am using V2.0.0,Beta2)? Since I wanted three drives A: 1.44MB, B:1.2MB and ?: 360kB I attached the first two drives to primary connector and 360kB drive to secondary connector. Now when I configure Sergey's BIOS to use any two of the three drives it works fine. As soon as I configure third logical drive, the XT-IDE BIOS will not boot from IDE devices. It will write:
Booting C>>A
and the third FD (360kB) drive's LED gets on. My obvious question is, can I have three drives and still boot from what used to be C: drive before ?

It could be a bug in XT-IDE BIOS and it picks the third floppy drive (drive number 02h) instead of the hard drive (drive number 80h).

I have also discovered that I can press A (then it writes Booting A>>A) and boot DOS 6.22 from the A:1.44. Then I have all the drives functional and as expected, A: is 1.44MB, B: is 1.2MB, C: D: and E: are IDE drives and F: is 360kB FDD and they all work fine.

But I can not do this with XT-IDE BIOS 2.0.0B3. It seems it ignores me pressing A :confused:
 
But I can not do this with XT-IDE BIOS 2.0.0B3.

I have already fixed some bugs related to drive swapping. Check your private messages for a link to latest XT builds. Most likely it will work just like beta 2. More than 2 floppy drives should work but I've never tested it. You could also try to manually set the number of floppy drives using xtidecfg.
 
Hi and thanks. I tested it. Settings the number of drives to 3 makes it possibleto boot from C: It behaves like this:
Booting D>>C

But then following happens. I have three IDE partitions, one on a CF card and two on a IDE HDD. Only first two are recognized. More than that only the first C: partition has working filesystem. I can see directories on D: but not their contents. I believe this partition is treated like FAT12 ?? And the last problem is, my F:360kB is not recognized.

I reverted back to Beta2, there I can boot from both A: and B: and have all disk partitons and three flopiies working correctly. If you want I can send you one FDC card with Sergey's BIOS, so that you can set three FDDs in BIOS. You probably do not need them physically.
 
Settings the number of drives to 3 makes it possibleto boot from C: It behaves like this: Booting D>>C
It should read "Booting D>>D" since D is the first available letter for hard drive (I thought that is how DOS drive letters are assigned but you say third floppy drive is F?). BIOS always uses drive numbers so that does not explain other problems.

I have three IDE partitions, one on a CF card and two on a IDE HDD. Only first two are recognized. More than that only the first C: partition has working filesystem. I can see directories on D: but not their contents. I believe this partition is treated like FAT12 ?? And the last problem is, my F:360kB is not recognized.
For some reason the drive numbers must point to wrong drive at some point. Did XTIDE Universal BIOS initialize before or after FD BIOS? You should try both ways. Another thing to try would be to build XTIDE Universal BIOS without serial floppy support (you can get the new build using the same link as before).

If you want I can send you one FDC card with Sergey's BIOS, so that you can set three FDDs in BIOS.
Sure, if nothing else helps.
 
Hi Tomi, it is better with R547. When I set in boot settings number of drives to 3 it writes:
Booting D>>D (it is problematic with automatic settings, it does not boot from A: neither from IDE)
Then in DOS I see as C: the drive from which it had booted (CF card as master IDE). The problem is with following drives. As far as I know, third and fourth drives get letter C: and D: in DOS 3 and prior. In DOS 5 and 6 they should get letters after the fixed drives. So there are two conventions for lettering. In my case it should be F: for the third drive 360kB. But I only see drives C:, D: and E:
D: is first partition from slave HDD but not handled correctly I can only see boot directory not files and subdirs. Second partition on slave IDE is missing. Instead as letter E: I see my 360kB.

I mean had I simple setup with just one IDE drive, than it would all be OK :) I make it difficult with three partitions on IDE drives.
 
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