I am curious as to what use are you trying to do with the old 286 computer? On Dec 1, 2010 9:18 AM, "brucehvn" <[email protected]> wrote: > A client of a company I work for gave us an old AST 286 machine (512K > ram) that they have been using for many years, but the old original > hard drive had finally started giving out. It was an old MFM or RLL > drive. > > I decided the best course of action was to remove the existing fixed > disk controller card and replace it with an IDE controller and one of > many old IDE 1 to 5 GB hard drives I have. > > I purchased a Promise EIDEMax II IDE controller card from eBay, brand > new in the box. At first when installing it into the 286, it acted as > if the card was not recognized at all. There was no sign of the > card's bios at boot time and running their plug and play configuration > utility would just hang as if it could not find the card. I put the > card in a different machine and was able to run the PNPUTIL program to > disable PNP support and configure the card with standard parameters as > described in the manual. > > When I put the card back in the 286, it was recognized, the bios > screen comes up, I can even go in the card's bios and change settings > as necessary. Everything seems to be happy. However, once I connect > any IDE drive to the controller, it hangs at boot at the point it > should be displaying the list of detected drives. According to the > manual, it should display the list of drives, then the message "BIOS > installed successfully" and then continue to boot. If I disconnect > the drive cable, then it boots up from a floppy with no problem. I've > tried 4 different hard drives ranging from 1 to 4.6 GB, Fujitsu, > Quantum, and Seagate brands, but no luck. All the drives have been > tested and definitely work in another machine. I'm using DOS 6.0 to > boot, but at the point of the hang, nothing has been loaded yet from > the floppy drive. I've tried using a different IDE cable as well, > just in case. > > I've checked DOS msd.exe for memory/irq conflicts, etc, but can see > nothing unusual. The card's BIOS is in an area that is unused (D000- > DBFF), and I've set the primary port on the card to each of the 4 > settings of Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quad, which basically > switches the IRQs and Ports among various choices, but no change. The > computer only has a video card, and memory card. The floppy > controller is on the MB. Oh, and also I've tried messing with the > computer's BIOS settings for the fixed disk. Normally I have it set > to none, but have tried a few different disk types, but it doesn't > seem to make a difference. > > Anyway, I'm baffled. Everything appears to be in order and this setup > seems like it should be working according to the manual for the > Promise card. These drives seem like they are from the right era for > this card. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Computer Tech Support" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]<computer-tech-support%[email protected]> . > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/computer-tech-support?hl=en. >
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