Slightly OT: XT-IDE

Hello All, I've been trying to help a friend of mine get his XT-IDE (DP ver 2 board) up and running to boot a HDD in an IBM 8525. It is a bit difficult since he is across the country but we have made progress. However, we still cannot get the system to boot. The card is recognized by the system, the boot menu comes up. At first we could not get it to find a HDD. However, after a bunch of trial error we were able to get the drive to be recognized. We booted w/ a DOS 6.22 disk, ran fdisk /mbr, and everything seems to have completed but after reboot the HDD will not format. Checking with fdisk shown no partition info at all. The XT-IDE is the only card in the system, booting from floppies is fine with no issues. We also have gotten a 1h error at times. Finally, to rule out the HDD as an issue we tried to boot using the serial connection. The card is seen by the server but when we attempt to boot again we get a 1h error. Config info as follows: ide_xt.bin: v2.0.0B3 (2013-03-02) Full Operating Mode: No IDE Controllers: 1 Power Management: Disabled Device Type: XTIDE r1 Base Address: 300h Control Block: 308h Master & Slave Settings: Block Mode Transfers: Yes CHS Translation: Auto Internal Write Cache: Disabled User Specified CHS/LBA: No Boot Settings: Display Mode: Default Number of Floppy Dr.: Auto Scan for Serial Drives: No Default Boot Drive: 80h The BIOS chip is an amtel http://www.atmel.com/images/doc0270.pdf EEPROM type: 2864 SDP: Enable Page Size: 1 byte EEPROM Address: D000h Generate Checksum byte: Yes At this point I am stumped. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. -Ali