[computer-tech-support: 8012] AST 286 and Promise EIDEMax II IDE Controller

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.

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