Sorry if this is the wrong place to post, not sure if I should start a new thread.
Anyway I recently bought a 8088 4.77MHz Hyundai Super16 PC. Came with 5&1/4 floppy and MFM drive. The problem is the MFM drive is knackered and I have no 360k boot floppy (or way to create one). But, I do have a XT-CF_lite V4.1 PCB. When I last tried it many months ago (on a 486), I had zero success.
I have a 486 (with no HDD, just floppy boot) as a tool. I have managed to get the CH375 USB to ISA card to work, but the SYS driver file has to be loaded from floppy. Nevertheless it gives a way to get files onto this PC and copied to the floppy.
I now have a homebrew option ROM PCB, and I blew ide_386l.bin into a 16k EPROM. Had lots of problems until I realised that I tried to put the EPROM at address 0xE0000 which clashed with the BIOS. When I moved it to 0xD0000 I get the familiar boot menu (A>> etc). Didn't help that it was looking for address 0x240 !
I then had lots of issues with the XT-CF Lite. To summarise
1) the silk screen info for the IO 4 bit switch is incorrect.
2) the 74LS688 address enable IC for the CF IO port was broken!!! I swapped with the ROM address enable IC and removed the non-working 28C16.
After re-blowing the EPROM with the IO port address of 0x300 and selecting "XT-CF PIO8", XTIDE was able to see the CF. Using my Novell Dos 7 boot floppy (from years ago) I was able to partition and format a 256Mb CF, and eventually I was able to boot Novell DOS 7 from the CF. Thank you XTIDE
The Hyundai PC has an empty ROM socket (16k size, at 0xF8000). I blew another 16k EPROM using ide_xt.bin and "XT-CF PIO8" again.
When I switched on this PC, the XTIDE menu appears, but the text that should read "SMART CF" is garbled. See attachment.
I made an assumption that the problem might be with the boot code of Novell DOS 7 (perhaps it uses 386 opcodes?), so I returned to the 486 PC and after many frustrating hours, I created another 256Mb CF card which booted MSDOS 3.11, which I read works for 8088 CPUs.
When I tried to boot the Hyundai PC with this version of DOS, it just hangs.
My question
1) any ideas what might be going wrong?
2) is there a way to switch on any verbose diagnostics? (even if it means doing a custom compiler of XTIDE).
Many thanks...
P.S. For some reason I have labelled all my Novell DOS 7 disks as "NWDOS". While I still have the original disks, I threw out the manuals years ago.