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soundblaster 16 IDE cf

heALer

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I have a Soundblaster 16 CT2290 with IDE interface in my 286. I want to connect an IDE to CF adapter. Will that work on a 286? My C drive is connected to a MFM controller. In BIOS I can choose harddrives from 1-47, but how do I know which is compatible with the cf card? The cf is 256MB sandisk.
When I connect it as slave jumper the computer starts normal, but no cf recognized (think I must add it in BIOS) on primary jumper it hangs after testing memory, so I guess thr computer see something.
I have a floppy with bios setup, but I guess thats normal on 286s.
 
Hi,

The IDE interface on ct2290 sound cards is for a proprietary IDE cd drive. It wont work.

If you REALLY want to get your CF adapter working, try using a generic 16-bit IDE I/O controller card. However you will have to get the machine to boot from the MFM controller first, and I could not tell you how to do that.

Does your BIOS support type 47 hard disk with user parameters? You will again have problems specifying a hard disk type that is compatible with your CF adapter.

You will not need to buy that XT IDE card.

Good luck with this -- you're trying to match very old and relatively new technologies together. It's going to be a tough one to crack.

Bert
 
Hi,

The IDE interface on ct2290 sound cards is for a proprietary IDE cd drive. It wont work.

If you REALLY want to get your CF adapter working, try using a generic 16-bit IDE I/O controller card. However you will have to get the machine to boot from the MFM controller first, and I could not tell you how to do that.

Does your BIOS support type 47 hard disk with user parameters? You will again have problems specifying a hard disk type that is compatible with your CF adapter.

You will not need to buy that XT IDE card.

Good luck with this -- you're trying to match very old and relatively new technologies together. It's going to be a tough one to crack.

Bert

What I red about the ct2290 is that it has a true ide interface, and its very few sb16 that has that.
So I dont need universal bios with a 16-bit ISA IDE controller? I have option in the bios to choose 1-47, but I cant user define.
My mfm harddrive works and boots dos 6.22 fine, but its very small. Would like to have a D: drive to have games and programs on, and still boot from the mfm drive, so I thought I could use the IDE on my ct2290 to have a storage drive.
 
Type 47 is usually the user-define entry. There is also the option of using a DDO (Dynamic Drive Overlay) to use the second hard drive in the system if none of the current drive types match it.
 
The IDE on SB boards was designed solely for CDROM use only IIRC. I saying that on more modern machines you may be able to use it with a hard drive.

If it were me I'd be pulling the MFM card and drive, fitting a multi i/o card with IDE. They're a dime a dozen. That way you have a bigger choice of options for extra storage space. Running the cf card in a later machine will determine the cyl/hds/sect/ which you can match to the nearest drive type. As mentioned above you can use DDO software or XT-IDE rom on a nic. Nics are always useful anyway for using remote machines as storage devices. That's assuming you have plenty of spare 16-bit ISA slots.
 
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The IDE on SB boards was designed solely for CDROM use only IIRC.

Sound Card manufactures seem to mention that the IDE interface on sound cards is for CD-ROM only. I suspect that they say it because hard drives were connected to VLB or PCI controllers when IDE appeared on sound cards. ISA bus would have then slowed down the hard drive performance.

CT2290 is especially nice card since not many sound cards work as a Primary IDE controller! Most other sound cards only allow secondary, tertiary or quaternary ports. Using ISA multi I/O card does not offer any advantage. In fact, many ISA multi I/O cards only support Primary IDE.
 
CT2290 is especially nice card since not many sound cards work as a Primary IDE controller! Most other sound cards only allow secondary, tertiary or quaternary ports. Using ISA multi I/O card does not offer any advantage. In fact, many ISA multi I/O cards only support Primary IDE.

So do you think I can boot an IDE hd as C drive on my 286 with ct2290, if I unplug the mfm controller?
I tried anydrive.exe to set hd to one in the bios fixed tables, but no luck so far.
I did that on another pc and then put it in the 286.
 
Sound Card manufactures seem to mention that the IDE interface on sound cards is for CD-ROM only. I suspect that they say it because hard drives were connected to VLB or PCI controllers when IDE appeared on sound cards. ISA bus would have then slowed down the hard drive performance.

CT2290 is especially nice card since not many sound cards work as a Primary IDE controller! Most other sound cards only allow secondary, tertiary or quaternary ports. Using ISA multi I/O card does not offer any advantage. In fact, many ISA multi I/O cards only support Primary IDE.
It would give the option of two IDE connectors though if the SB only has one IDE connection on board. This alone would be useful. They also have the advantage of freeing up ISA slots occupied by seperate FDD/parallel/serial port cards for other uses.
 
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If you are booting from your system BIOS to an MFM controller, IMO it's highly unlikely that the system BIOS will talk at all to an IDE controller (different IO port addresses for a start!). Hence you need the XTIDE Universal BIOS to make it work, but if the controller supports at least the basic port decoding then it really should work! I'd like to go one step further and see this configuration running in a PC or PC/XT :)
 
If you are booting from your system BIOS to an MFM controller, IMO it's highly unlikely that the system BIOS will talk at all to an IDE controller (different IO port addresses for a start!).

Maybe you are confusing XT MFM and AT MFM. I don't know much about MFM drives and controllers but I'm under the impression that from software point of view the AT MFM and first IDE drives are the same. Essentially first IDE drives are MFM controllers and drives combined (and that is the meaning of IDE, Integrated Drive Electronics). That also explains why old BIOSes cannot autodetect drives (MFM controller had to be told what kind of drive was connected to it). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
 
In BIOS I can choose harddrives from 1-47, but how do I know which is compatible with the cf card?

I had little luck with CF cards on my 286 couple of years ago. I don't know why since real hard disks, from 40 MB to 10 or 20 GB worked fine (but of course the BIOS had the 504 MiB limit).
Type 47 should be user defined type. First try the CF card on more modern system to find out correct CHS parameters but most likely they are 980 cylinders, 16 heads and 32 sectors per track for 256 MB CF cards. Write precompensation and landing zone are not used by IDE drives and are typically set to 65535 and number of cylinders but they can be anything.

I would first start by trying with real hard drive. For 500 MB and larger hard drives set cylinders to 1024, heads to 16 and sectors per track to 63. That sets the drive to be 504 MiB that is the maximum size supported by such old BIOS.
 
I had little luck with CF cards on my 286 couple of years ago. I don't know why since real hard disks, from 40 MB to 10 or 20 GB worked fine (but of course the BIOS had the 504 MiB limit).
Type 47 should be user defined type. First try the CF card on more modern system to find out correct CHS parameters but most likely they are 980 cylinders, 16 heads and 32 sectors per track for 256 MB CF cards. Write precompensation and landing zone are not used by IDE drives and are typically set to 65535 and number of cylinders but they can be anything.

I would first start by trying with real hard drive. For 500 MB and larger hard drives set cylinders to 1024, heads to 16 and sectors per track to 63. That sets the drive to be 504 MiB that is the maximum size supported by such old BIOS.

Number 47 is not user define on mine, I cant change anything, just type 1-47, when I press F1 it shows a help window with all fixed drives, number 40-44 has 0 on every entry.
I put the cf in another computer and got 695 cylinders, 15 heads and 32 sectors. I tried to choose a drive closest to that but it only hangs at startup for like 20 secs and says Harddrive error, then I can continue, even tried a normal ide drive, but no lock, when I come home today I will try to change some jumpers on the sb card, maybe they are set wrong.
 
I put the cf in another computer and got 695 cylinders, 15 heads and 32 sectors.
Those cannot be right parameters since that would be 162 MiB drive.

I tried to choose a drive closest to that but it only hangs at startup for like 20 secs and says Harddrive error, then I can continue, even tried a normal ide drive, but no lock, when I come home today I will try to change some jumpers on the sb card, maybe they are set wrong.

You must set the SB16 IDE address to 1F0 and IDE interrupt to 14. Those are the settings for Primary IDE. Number of cylinders can be safely set to less but drive might only accept certain heads and sector per track values. I recommend to forget about the CF card until you get real hard drive working.
 
Those cannot be right parameters since that would be 162 MiB drive.



You must set the SB16 IDE address to 1F0 and IDE interrupt to 14. Those are the settings for Primary IDE. Number of cylinders can be safely set to less but drive might only accept certain heads and sector per track values. I recommend to forget about the CF card until you get real hard drive working.

No I have the jumpers to ide primary on the sb ct2290, and the cf-card connected! And it works!! :)
I wrote wrong before, the cf is, 695 cylinders, 15 heads and 48 clusters. It shows up now as 244mb C drive.
Will try to install DOS now..
 
I had to do a new partition, so its down to 111mb, problem is that all fixed drives in the setup has 17 sectors per track, if I only could user define the entries.. how does this little tool anydrive.exe work? Its writing some info about chs in the mbr, does it "tells" bios how big the drive is, and ignore the entry I make in the setup?
 
Basicly yes. I've had 1.2gig and bigger drives running fine on a 286 using dynamic drive overlay software.
 
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Maybe you are confusing XT MFM and AT MFM. I don't know much about MFM drives and controllers but I'm under the impression that from software point of view the AT MFM and first IDE drives are the same...

Learn something every day :D Thanks Tomi.
 
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