Joe, I used a phoneix bios cmos setup program for the old 286 clones, works 100% Yes, did that on XT/286. Hint: That bios DOES have 1.44MB support. Cheers, Wizard

Try again after reading my lastest info and suggestions. When CMOS is reset to defaults especially on oldies machines, it's usually 360K or 720K (9 sectors, tracks is s/w controlled). Try booting a 360K boot disk. Mine was loose XT/286 board and booted up with a regular dos 360K or 720K no problems. Oh heck, I even can hook up 1.44MB floppy drive and boot with a 720K boot disk. Done that on XT and old AT, XT/286 no less! The only exception is that most older machines from compaq, IBM ps/2 early PS/1, few oddballs like old toshibas needs special disk created. I'm certain this isn't the case for that AT, XT/286, AT, old 386 and rare early 486 clones. The oldie machines defaults to the minimum density while newer machines defaults to 1.44MB when cmos got whacked. (all Peecees in last 10 yr). Cheers, Wizard

At 06:33 PM 3/3/01 +0000, Tony wrote: I tried a 360k boot disk in the XT/286 and it won't boot with the CMOS erased. I think I tried a 1.2Mb boot disk also with the same results. However I did get it booted with the setup disk that Don sent. There was a delay becuase the 1.2Mb drive in my main computer didn't want to make a good disk. I finally pulled one of the 360k drives out of the XT/286 and installed it in my main computer and used it. After that no more problems making disks. After I got the XT/286 CMOS setup I tried to read the hard drive but it turns out that the drive is bad. RATS! I was hoping to find software for the STAG EPROM programmers still on it. That's the only reason that I picked the machine up. Well, I'll save the floppy drives out of it and pitch the rest of it. Thanks for your help everyone. Joe

At 04:05 PM 3/8/01 -0800, Mike wrote: I considered that but I decided that that was too much trouble. Actually I'm reconsidering that too. I suppose I might go pull it out of the trash before the trash people get it in the morning. I don't know what's wrong with the drive. It's spinning but it reports "Drive not ready" on every test. This hasn't been my week for hard drives. I've spend over two days trying to figure out why I keep getting errors when I try to Prep (Low level format and partion) a hard drive in my Z-100. I've tried three drives incluing a known working one from an XT-286 and they all report "Bad Sectors on Track 0" and then fail to initialize. The drives pass the media test so they should be physically OK. Joe