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IBM XT 286 / 5162 with XT-IDE

Sydius

Member
Joined
Dec 25, 2017
Messages
11
Location
USA
With the XT-IDE card in, the computer boots to the XT Universal BIOS but won't boot correctly from the floppy drive. If I boot FreeDOS, it shows "FreeDOS", sometimes twice, then hangs with floppy activity afterward. If I boot DOS 6.22, it displays a small amount of text saying it's booting DOS, then the same thing happens.

Computer: IBM XT 286 / 5162
Card: XT-IDE rev4
Floppy drive: 1.44MB 3.5" and 1.2M 5.25"
Floppy controller: original IBM card with default jumpers
Hard drives tried: four normal (not solid state) IDE drives of various vintages (from mid 90's to late 2000's)
BIOS's tried: original, AMI, Award

I tried compatibility mode and fast mode. Neither make it work.

I can sometimes boot to DOS 3, but only with the non-original BIOS.

Under no circumstances does it detect an IDE drive plugged into the card. If I put it in compatibility mode, it sometimes hangs while detecting the drive for some drives and not others.

If I take the card out of the computer, the computer boots from the floppy drive just fine and everything works perfectly.

I tried several revisions of XT-IDE Universal BIOS ranging in age and none of them made a difference, but all seemed to work correctly insofar as they boot to either a menu or straight to detecting the drives.

What else might I try to get this thing working? Are there diagnostic steps I should take?
 
I'd remove the Original IBM Hard drive / Floppy controller and just use an 16-bit IDE / Floppy controller, If you need to use your R4 XTIDE card just disable the IDE part on the 16-bit controller and with the AMI bios you must set hard drives to NONE (0) so the XTIDE Universal bios has complete control.

I use the AMI bios and latest revision of the XUB r591 with a 16-bit IDE / Floppy controller in my 5162 with no problems.
 
Do note that you can't just switch between COMPAT and HI SPEED modes without reconfiguring the XT-IDE Universal BIOS.

I'm not surprised that you can only boot with the non-original BIOS -- that's a known problem on 5170s and I'd expect the XT/286 to use a similar (if not the same) BIOS.

Does the card not detect IDE drives at all, or does it show 80h and no information on the boot menu? If it's showing 80h and no drive information, you may have a bad '573 latch at U1. Apparently one of my recent orders of '573 latches contained at least two duds. To make things more frustrating, they're intermittent/out-of-spec, so they passed final test (if you bought an assembled board from me). If that's the case, you can send the card back to me and I'll repair it for you, even if you bought it as a parts kit.
 
Does the card not detect IDE drives at all, or does it show 80h and no information on the boot menu? If it's showing 80h and no drive information, you may have a bad '573 latch at U1. Apparently one of my recent orders of '573 latches contained at least two duds. To make things more frustrating, they're intermittent/out-of-spec, so they passed final test (if you bought an assembled board from me). If that's the case, you can send the card back to me and I'll repair it for you, even if you bought it as a parts kit.

On the build I have right now, it shows it detecting master on address 300h, finds none, then detects slave, finds none, tries to boot from C, prints error 1h, then tries to boot from A. So, I don't think that's my problem.

If I have no drive plugged into the card, it goes by quickly. If I have a drive plugged into the card, it either hangs (depending on the jumper settings and the specific drive I use) or takes a long time (as in, maybe 3 or 4 seconds) to do the same thing. I've never manged to get it to print anything else.

I also tried taking out the IBM controller card, just to see if that would make a difference, and disabled the floppies in the BIOS. It didn't matter; it still wouldn't show the hard drives I had plugged into the XT-IDE.

I'll try r591 just to see what happens today, but I'm thinking I messed up while putting the kit together and burned up one of the chips or something. I beep-tested the crap out of it and found no problems, nor can I see anything wrong, though.
 
Can't you use a regular 16-bit IDE controller with an EPROM socket on a different card (like a NIC) to get IDE on a 5162?

Also, AT style machines fron IBM don't expect other disk controllers than the one from IBM themselves, so you will probably get some errors on boot if you removed the original.
 
Also, AT style machines from IBM don't expect other disk controllers than the one from IBM themselves, so you will probably get some errors on boot if you removed the original.
The POST in the BIOS expects the IBM supplied HDD/FDD controller (or compatible controller). A 601 error is produced. Seen in the later 5170 BIOS' and in the 5162 BIOS. I suspect that most people in this situation swap out the IBM BIOS for a non-IBM one.

Another problem that has been seen when people remove the hard drive (rotating media type) and controller card from a 5162, is a failure of the power supply to start (due to inadequate loading).
 
I'm not surprised that you can only boot with the non-original BIOS -- that's a known problem on 5170s and I'd expect the XT/286 to use a similar (if not the same) BIOS.
It has been confirmed by someone on these forums that the 'XUB and IBM 5170 BIOS' incompatibility, also exists with the 5162's IBM BIOS.
 
Can't you use a regular 16-bit IDE controller with an EPROM socket on a different card (like a NIC) to get IDE on a 5162?

Yeah, that's my backup plan. The only other IDE controller I happen to have has about a billion jumpers and I can't find any documentation for how to set them, alas.

Also, AT style machines fron IBM don't expect other disk controllers than the one from IBM themselves, so you will probably get some errors on boot if you removed the original.

I'm using a non-IBM BIOS at the moment (the AMI one, though I also have the Award one), so this isn't an issue.

Another problem that has been seen when people remove the hard drive (rotating media type) and controller card from a 5162, is a failure of the power supply to start (due to inadequate loading).

I'm leaving the old MFM drive, which isn't working, in for this reason. Eventually, I'll probably swap it for a resistor load just to free up space, but for now it turns on and makes a rather satisfying noise too. My plan C, if I can't get either IDE card working, is to try to find a working MFM drive.

It has been confirmed by someone on these forums that the 'XUB and IBM 5170 BIOS' incompatibility, also exists with the 5162's IBM BIOS.

Yeah, I also tried the AMI/Award BIOSes, thinking it would fix it, but it hasn't for me yet.

At this point, I think something is likely wrong with the way I soldered it, so I'm going to see if I can pinpoint any problems there. It does load the ROM just fine, though.
 
OK, tried some more stuff.

I flashed r591 ide_tiny and that build let me boot from the floppy drive once but never detected any hard drive.

Then, I tried the ide_xt, because I saw somebody else have luck with that one on an XT 286. This one was more interesting: the first drive I tried presented this text:

Code:
[FONT=Fixedsys]
Master at 300h: ►►?
Slave   at 300h: not found
Booting C»C
Error 80h!
Booting A»A
Starting MS-DOS...
[/FONT]

It then hung forever.

I power-cycled it, changing nothing, and the next time it went back to "not found" for master/slave and instead said "Error 1h!" again. It still wouldn't boot from the floppy until I removed the card entirely.

I took some pictures:
IMG_20180116_163356.jpg
IMG_20180116_163256.jpg
 
OK, I did some probing and the only thing I could see that was odd about the latches is that the one in U1 has an output that goes to 0 instead of floating when output is disabled. It's the only pin that does that. I can latch it high and it stores it correctly, but the moment I disable output, it drops back to 0 instead of floating.

Could that cause a problem like the one I am seeing?
 
Could that cause a problem like the one I am seeing?

Never mind, pulling that one pin low seems intentional now that I see the schematic. I'm going to replace those two chips (U1 and U2) with faster versions I ordered from DigiKey (and put sockets...) just to see if that fixes it. I don't think they're out-of-spec, but I'm an electronics novice and don't know how to measure the response time. I did hook it up to a square wave and measured the delta to be about ~20ns on my oscilloscope, but I really don't know what I'm doing there. :)
 
You should be using the AT binary of the XUB in the XT 286 and configure first with XTIDECFG.COM, Have you tried this card in another machine ?, Though it does sound like you have a bad IC on the card.
 
I'd suspect from the output of the boot screen that U1 is defective. If you'd like to send it back I'll fix it for free. This is the third defective latch from that batch of ICs.
 
I'd suspect from the output of the boot screen that U1 is defective. If you'd like to send it back I'll fix it for free. This is the third defective latch from that batch of ICs.

Thanks for the offer, but I replaced it (and its neighbor in U2) today with two SN74F573N chips (in sockets this time) and it's still doing exactly the same thing.

I also removed everything else from the computer (including the IBM floppy disk controller) except for the VGA card, but that didn't change anything except that, of course, I get a FDD controller error during startup that I can skip past and then it does the same thing (garbage for found drives, can't boot from them). I also tried three different VGA cards, so I don't think the VGA card is somehow conflicting.

I did discover today that if I disable the ROM by toggling the ENA switch on the XT-IDE card, it will boot from the floppy successfully. If I enable it, it goes back to not being able to boot from the floppy (in addition to the hard drives not working).

I'm using the XT build because I saw somebody else on the forum have luck with it in a XT 286, but I also tried the AT and that, too, didn't work.

It seems that for the "Master at 300h:" if it doesn't display nothing or "not found", it displays garbage. It's usually the two arrows and the question mark the first time and if I do a reboot (without a hard power reset), it displays a smiley and two other garbage characters.

At this point, I'm not sure what to look at next. Maybe U11? It almost seems like it's driving the data lines even when it shouldn't, since it somehow prevents my FDD controller from working. I don't know how that meshes with the ENA toggle discovery above, though.
 
Well, I feel dumb. I hadn't ran the configure tool because I couldn't boot to the floppy with the card in... until I saw the bit about holding down CTRL. I now realize the configure tool is needed to change the device to XT-IDE rev2, which improved things dramatically. I also found I could do that by editing Main.asm directly before building the ROM.

Sadly, it still doesn't work, though. It now always detects the drive correctly and will even try to boot from it. If it has an operating system on it, it will read the first sector of the drive and display the "Starting DOS" message, but then hangs. If I boot from the floppy drive, it does exactly the same thing: reads the first sector, then hangs. If I remove the card or hold CTRL, the floppy drive works correctly.

What else might I check?
 
YAY! I got it working! It turns out that it was flat out incompatible with the VGA card I was using.

In total, to get this working on my IBM XT 286, for future readers:

1) Replaced stock BIOS with Award BIOS (not 100% sure this is needed)
2) Replaced the two latches on the card with new ones (probably _not_ needed, see earlier posts in this thread)
3) Changed the default bDevice in Main.asm to DEVICE_8BIT_XTIDE_REV2 along with the wBasePort/wControlBlockPort (or just use the configure tool by holding down CTRL during startup to bypass the ROM)
4) Replaced my Paradise VGA card with an OAK VGA card

It's probably the case that, if I knew what the jumpers did on my old VGA card, that I could get it to work. One probably enables/disables the floppy controller on it. No idea why things work OK without the XT-IDE ROM loaded.

I'm still using the stock IBM floppy disk controller, which is working fine.
 
I have run into a strange issue with my 2nd 5162. I recently bought 2 5162's which both had dead MFM's in them. I got one up and running fully functional with XT-IDE/CF Card, Gotek and 1.2M floppy. I started on the 2nd today and I keep getting a 601 Disk Controller error no matter what. I made sure the BIOS was configured correctly for the attached drive. BIOS battery I just replaced. I tried 4 different drives, 3 different cables and 2 other floppy controllers. No matter what I do it always states this 601 error. It does this with no other cards installed except the video card. I tried two different video cards too just to be sure. I could only get it to boot using a 3rd party 16-bit floppy controller in the following manner although it still stated the 601 error. I moved the video card into the 2nd from the left 8-bit ISA slot. And then put the 16-bit floppy controller in the 2nd from the right 16-bit slot. It boots this way with the 601 error but the XT-IDE does not work properly when I install it with this configuration. It causes the boot ROM window to slowly print out and finally fails to read the CF. Starting to wonder if something is wrong on the motherboard itself. This is the exact same model XT-IDE I installed in the other 5162 with the same settings. The XT-IDE works fine as long as I don't install the 16-bit IDE controller. Has anybody seen this before? The disk controller is not on the motherboard though, so can it still be the motherboard at fault. I know I could use my good system to help troubleshoot but I don't want to risk messing it up since it is working.
 
Okay I got this thing working. Very strange though. I originally had issue where no matter what controller I installed it would give 601 error. I realize this happens when a non-IBM controller is installed. But the drives just wouldn't work no matter what I did. Even if it was only the controller and video card installed. Then I realized my XT-IDE ROM address (C800) was conflicting with the EGA card. I changed it to D800 and the erratic XT-IDE behavior went away. Then to my surprise when I installed the floppy controller back it also started working. Even though before I tried it without XT-IDE installed and with BIOS set to no HD. Maybe I am crazy. Anyhow, I got both of my 5162 XT 286's fully functional now. :) Both have flash card readers and 1.2MB floppy drives. And one has Gotek and the other has 1.44MB floppy. Both have EGA cards, one original IBM with memory expansion and the other a 3rd party card. Just got to shine up the cases and they are done. Also started working on a 3270 I picked up. Already found video card issue, defective Tandon drive and defective RAM. I replaced the video card for now and identified/replaced the defective RAM. Just need to repair the Tandon and it'll be done too.
 
Then I realized my XT-IDE ROM address (C800) was conflicting with the EGA card.
How did you work that out? By simply changing the start address of the XT-IDE's ROM ?

I am aware of possible C8000 addressed ROM conflicts with VGA cards (see [here]), but I do not recall hearing of the same in regard to EGA. What is the make-model of the EGA card?
 
Okay I got this thing working. Very strange though. I originally had issue where no matter what controller I installed it would give 601 error. I realize this happens when a non-IBM controller is installed. But the drives just wouldn't work no matter what I did
Yep, A common problem with the 5162 and 5170, Not just an incompatible controller but dirty / worn ISA slots / Fingers can also cause these problems and simply inserting and removing the controller multiple times can often make the issue go away Or giving the contacts a good clean of course. I don't use EGA in mine.
 
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