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IBM XT 5160 "Disk Boot Failure"

mikeyp

mikeyp

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2019
Messages
84
Location
Leicestershire, UK
Hi all

Really weird issue today with my 5160. It's been working fine, no major issues, everything pretty reliable so far.

Today I went to put a 2nd floppy drive (Gotek with HxC firmware) in above the hard disk. Connected it up, turned off switch 7 on the motherboard, everything good to go you'd think. It booted first time just fine. Now, whenever I turn it off or press Ctrl-Alt-Del, it gives disk boot failure. Doesn't matter what drive, they're all the same. Original 360K Floppy, disk boot failure. MFM HDD, disk boot failure. XT-IDE, disk boot failure. Any one of the 3 on their own with the others removed, disk boot failure. The XT-IDE BIOS loads, I can select by pressing A, B, C, D etc, but all disk boot failure.

Here's where it gets really weird. Put in a floppy disk I generated with WinImage, I get the boot sector text with Gilles Vollant so it's clearly reading ok, it then says it's not a system disk, trying system disk and... disk boot failure.

If I leave it for 30 minutes and start it from cold, it boots fine. Reads all drives fine, until I restart.

I've just put switch 7 back on and taken the extra floppy out of the equation, back as it was and... disk boot failure.

Anyone got any thoughts on what now please?
 
Ok, I have identified 2 issues. Thankfully none appear to be hardware.

The first was my mistake with the gotek drive. It wasn't parsing the .img files correctly. I should have realised when the display said the disks had 80 tracks. Ever a wonder it wouldn't boot. I milled the images through Jeff's utility to turn them into .hfe files and they booted and worked flawlessly. Every time.

This got me thinking. I wonder if I've picked up a boot sector virus somehow. I proved earlier the floppy drive was good with the imaged disk generated by winimage. What this does mean is all my DOS disks are borked. Being careful not to allow it to boot from the CF card, I booted from the gotek's fresh IBM DOS 3.30 images, used debug to wipe the beginning of the CF card, used fdisk to partition it, formatted it and hey presto, DOS booted right off the CF card again.

Now, the floppies are simple. I'll just re-image them.

As for the MFM drive, should I start over or can it be cleaned up?
 
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