I finall flashed my XTIDE rev 1, now what?

[Randy Dawson]

Thanks Alexadre!

I thought I was so close when I finally got XTIDE to recognize my flash card.

FDISK worked OK too.


FORMAT did not, and the error was:


Drive not ready


I thought there was something else wrong, my bus size on XTIDE config, who knows.

I reflashed, but that failed, locking me up.

Pull JP1 to get it to boot, then put it back on while power on, got me back up to reflash and clear the errors.


Reducing the partition size in FDISK did the trick.


FORMAT C: /S put the system on and now I boot from the flash!


Thank you so much.


Randy


________________________________
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of Alexandre Souza <alexandre.tabajara at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2017 8:13 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: I finall flashed my XTIDE rev 1, now what?

Simple way I got several XT-IDE working:
- Boot with freedos boot disk
- FDISK /MBR
- FDISK and create ONE 31MB partition (note it is 31MB and not 32MB)
- Reboot
- Format C: /s /u (the /u is very important)
- REBOOT. There is a bug on freedos that a copy command gives a heap
corruption after a format
- Do whatever you want, even creating a D: partition of 2GB

This is what I did in many CF cards that didn't worked before.

2017-01-28 0:13 GMT-02:00 Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>:

> On Sat, 28 Jan 2017, Randy Dawson wrote:
>
>> I have a Compact Flash adapter and card, while I wait for the soldering
>> iron to heat up and make the power cable for it, I wanted to ask, what are
>> the next steps?
>> FORMAT, or FDISK /MBR?
>>
>
> It is not clear what you are attempting to do.
>
> If you have a drive that looks like an XT drive with controller to the
> computer, and it has not been used before, then
> MS-DOS would normally want a low-level-format, which presumably does not
> need to be done in this case, and for which FORMAT.COM is absolutely no
> help, anyway.   Low-level-format was done by IBM's "Advanced Diagnostics",
> or by third party programs, or by doing a jump to code in the ROM of the
> controller.
>
>
> If it doesn't need low-level-format, then the next step is partitioning
> (or do you already have a FAT16 partition on it?), for which you use
> FDISK.  NOT FDISK /MBR.   FDISK when it creates the partition, will create
> the partition table and Master Boot Record in the first sector.
>
> MS-DOS from V2.00 to V3.30 is limited to 32MB.
> Compaq MS-DOS 3.31, and any MS-DOS 5.00 and above supports up to 2GB
> drives.
>
> FAT16 in NTFS and other systems that support it can go to 4GB.  But,
> MS-DOS uses a SIGNED long 32 bit int, permitting drive sizes from -
> 2147483648 to 2147483647.  Yes, there are some parts of MS-DOS that
> support negative file sizes and drive sizes
>
>
> If it is already low-level-format'ed and partitioned, then FDISK /MBR
> (which was not always documented) will rewrite the partition table and
> Master Boot Record.
>
> THEN you want to FORMAT x: /S   where x: is the drive letter.
> /S of FORMAT tells it to also put the 3 OS files on it:
> IO.SYS   (hidden file that must be in specific location)
> MSDOS.SYS   (hidden file that must be in specific location)
> COMMAND.COM  reasonably "normal" file that can be copied with a "normal"
> file copy.
> (Or IBMBIO.COM, IBMDOS.COM, COMMAND.COM if you were using PC-DOS)
>
> At that point, it should be fully bootable!
> Although some hardware might require specific content in root directory
> files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT .
>
> You should still create a DOS directory, and copy all of the other DOS
> files into there, such as FORMAT.COM, FDISK.COM, DEBUG.COM, etc.
> Putting all of those in the root directory will work, but is a bad idea.
> In early versions of MS-DOS, just about all of the DOS executable programs
> were .COM    Later, as they started to exceed 54K, they started using .EXE,
> but NAMING them .COM "for compatability".  Now, they are probably all .EXE
> since MICROS~1 can not do a "Hello, World" in less than 64K.
>
>
> What is the recommended way to initialize the CF flash and put a system on
>> it?
>>
>
> no idea.  I just laid out the MS-DOS steps to prepare a hard disk.
>
> Run CHKDSK Find your copies of LINK.EXE and EXE2BIN.EXE , which you will
> need for assembler and compilers.  Originally, they came with MS-DOS.  Then
> for a while MS-DOS said that they came with the compiler, and the compiler
> said that they came with MS-DOS.
> The MS-DOS executables (including LINK and EXE2BIN) will balk at running
> on a version of DOS other than what they came with.  For THAT, V5.00
> includes SETVER , which lets MS-DOS lie about its version for such programs.
>
>
> Anything special to do, so that I can use the whole 2GB of the flash?
>>
> Need to use DOS V3.31 or above to get past 32MB, other than that, it would
> be a function of the adapter?   and, of course FDISK, . . . Prior to V3.31,
> the work around was to break up a drive into multiple 32MB partitions.
>
> (BTW, MB to FDISK is 2^20 (1048576), NOT the silly numbers used by drive
> peddlers, such as 1000 * 1024.)
>