Tandy 2500 SX/20 CF-IDE Adapter | Lowercase 'j' at boot

[GWXerxes]

I've got a Tandy 2500 SX/20 I've been working on and I'm having some issues getting a compact flash adapter working.

Originally I tried a 2GB card out of a Tandy 1000 TL/2 I just finished working on and it was nothing but problems, so I bought a new 64mb SanDisk card and tried that. The BIOS picks up the CF card no problem both on automatic and manual mode if I give it the correct geometry. I'm able to boot from a DOS disk and read/write files to the CF card problem. Both FDISK/FORMAT have no problems with the card and DOS 5/6 install with no problems reported. When I try to boot from the card though it doesn't give an error but just displays a lowercase 'j' character on the screen and I have no idea what to make of that.

Searching around for posts about the 2500 shows that most (everyone?) has had problems with it using CF cards but usually they can't get them working at all, I seem to be the only one that has it reading/writing/installing. Searching around for boot failures with just the letter 'j' on screen returns more results than expected, mostly on newer hardware though which makes me think it's some sort of error code that either isn't understood or isn't displayed/rendered correctly. Basically I'm wondering if anybody's ever seen anything like the 'j' before and knows what it could indicate since it seems common enough.



Thanks.
Xerxes

 

[Malc]

I don't own any Tandy's but i've seen it before on other computers, I think it's basically an incompatibility with the Bios and CF card, ie: the CF has a different drive configuration to what the Bios is expecting to see, Have you thought about using the XTIDE Universal Bios.

 

[lafos]

I had similar issues when I set one up in a Pentium machine. Someone suggested executing an FDISK /MBR command to fix the master boot record. That worked for me.

 

[GWXerxes]

Someone suggested executing an FDISK /MBR command to fix the master boot record.

Absolutely Fantastic, that worked like a charm. I feel kinda dumb now but my knowledge with FDISK was limited to say the least. Thanks!

 

[GWXerxes]

I had similar issues when I set one up in a Pentium machine. Someone suggested executing an FDISK /MBR command to fix the master boot record. That worked for me.

Thanks! That was it. I feel kinda silly it was that simple, but I'm not that great with FDISK. Learn something new every day!

 

[GWXerxes]

Thanks! FDISK /MBR worked like a charm!