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5160 Boot Order?

C

Cevyn

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 23, 2011
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59
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Hagerstown, MD, USA
Hi everyone! I have an IBM 5160. It has a 360k floppy and a WD12 10mb hard drive. It boots just fine from the hard drive. It won't boot a floppy diskette unless the hard drive is disconnected. It does poll the floppy drive during POST if the hard drive is connected, but won't boot from it. On modern systems I know this would be the boot order in BIOS, but I'm unaware of how to change this on an XT. Suggestions? Thanks!!
 
If the floppy diskette is bootable and the floppy drive is working, then it should boot from the floppy first. This should happen whether the hard drive is connected or not.
 
That's what I thought. So I find it rather strange that it always tries to boot the hard drive first if it's connected...
 
I pulled out my early 5160 and experimented with switches 7/8 on the switch block. With a hard drive present, none of the 4 switch combinations resulted in a failure to boot from the floppy drive.

When you write, "unless the hard drive is disconnected", do you mean hard drive disconnected from the hard drive controller, or do you mean hard drive controller removed?
 
Drive disconnected from the controller, or the power unplugged. Basically, if the controller doesn't see a hard drive, it boots fine. If it sees one, it always boots the hard drive first and ignores the floppy.
 
On the ST11M hard drive controller, remove the jumpers at W1. The way they're set now is for the onboard BIOS to be mapped at E0000H, which is an address that's normally reserved for things like DOS-in-ROM and handled specially. With no jumpers, the BIOS is mapped at C8000H, which is where it normally resides. You can also try other jumper settings for alternate addresses.

See the Seagate guide for details.
 
The jumpers were only hanging off one pin, not actually shorting anything, so that *is* how it's set. Just for the sake of it, I completely removed them now. Problem still persists.
 
Can you read the floppy without errors once you've booted the HD? Maybe try a diskcopy and see if it behaves the same with the new diskette?
 
Well, the ST11 was an early controller and it's possible that it may work this way by design and that floppy boot is only a fallback measure--it all depends on the ST11 BOS extension code.

I assume that after boot from hard disk, the floppy drives work without any problem.

It might also be that since the installation software for the ST11 did both high- and low-level format, a boot manager was installed on the hard drive as part of the process. Do you still have the installation software for the ST11?
 
Chuck(G) said:
It might also be that since the installation software for the ST11 did both high- and low-level format, a boot manager was installed on the hard drive as part of the process.
Click to expand...
That was my first thought, a boot manager or a drive overlay, but they usually announce themselves and I wouldn't expect either one in an XT; still, anything's possible. By any chance does anything happen if you press a key during the boot phase (the space bar usually interrupts OnTrack's DDO).
 
Yup, the floppy drive works perfectly after booting from HD.

I do not have the ST11 install disk any longer. This machine is still working from way back in the 80s when it was first set up :-o

EDIT: Pushing keys does not affect the boot process :-(
 
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