Compaq Portable Plus + Inboard386 + Lotech CF lite = no boot

[cb88]

So The bootrom does load so I do have a BIOS that can load roms... so that isn't it. The Inboard was in it when I got it and it requires a bootrom IIRC anyway...so yeah.

The XTIDE Universal BIOS says... No master and no slave found. So it seems it can't see the card?

I installed DOS to the CF card I have which is a Sandisk SDCFHS-016G-AFFP

QEMU can boot from the drive when connected to a CF to USB adapter. I setup the drive under Linux with QEMU as that seemed much less problematic than windows getting in my way every turn. I installed from the DOS 6.22 floppy images in QEMU with the CF disk also mapped into QEMU, rebooted and did fdisk /mbr and QEMU was then able to boot directly from it.

Any ideas?

I tried basically all jumper settings on the XT-CF lite board to no effect. Note this is the red XT-CF lite from texelec. I'm leaning toward this being just the card isn't compatible but wanted to see what others think.

 

[Cmolson]

I had this problem using a larger CF card (some no-name one from aliexpress). It showed the exact same error about no master/slave.

I then used an old 32MB Cisco card I had and it worked right away. I didn't format using QEMU first, so I was going to check out the non-working cards on my linux laptop using something like gparted.

 

[cb88]

Yeah I ordered a couple SD and Micro SD to CF type 1 adapters from ebay.... I'll post my results in the week after next when I get back from a work trip. They are supposed to provide an actual IDE interface to acess the SD cards so... should work and I've seen reports that they do work, it should allow for going past 4GB reliably....

 

[Stone]

DOMs seem to be so much more compatible than CF that I use them exclusively. Since they plug directly into the IDE interface no adapter is necessary.

 

[cb88]

So, the problem I was running into yesterday was not having the inboard driver loaded... will report back more later but I think it is all good now. Also the SD card CF interface seems to be working well so far...will know more once I try to write some more data.

Edit note I am intentionally using the lite version of XTIDE with only CF interface out the back as it is easy to remove without cracking open the portable.