business for many years. The computer in questions hooks to one of
their very old hardware flight sims and runs proprietary software to
record and report data from the flight sim.
On Dec 1, 8:30 am, Chris Kelly <ckell...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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" <u...@brucehbase.org> 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.
>
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