XTIDE cannot boot from hard disk

[Diederik Huys]

I have a clone 80286 computer with 5MiB of RAM and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 drive. XTIDE is configured on a network card with EPROM socket. XTIDE has been configured for 1 IDE controller, with interrupts enabled.

This system was working successfully before, until the drive slowed down more and more, notably during the boot process. At a given point, the computer started to hang at the point "Loading MS-DOS..." needing a hard reset.

I made the following attempts:

• define manufacturer recommended CHS-settings in BIOS and skip XTIDE initialisation with CTRL-key : computer boots perfectly
• move NIC and harddisk to another (386-class) computer: computer and XTIDE both work
• (in 286-computer:) boot with XTIDE from A-drive. The disk is the MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk #1. The OS starts, but the install fails with "Internal Stack Overflow".
• as before, but skip install by pressing <F5>. This works and I get a command prompt. But the moment I access the drive (dir, chkdsk, fdisk, ...) the computer hangs with "Internal Stack Overflow"
• reconfigure the NIC to have its interrupt relocated from 5 to 10 (since the stack message may be related to an interrupt conflict) : no effect.
• re-flashing to another EPROM : no effect
• get fresh copies of the MS-DOS 6.22 install disks, wipe the partition table, boot from floppy without install. The moment that FDISK tries to access the disk, the computer hangs.
• skip XTIDE-init, install DOS on 512MiB-partition, reboot without XTIDE and do auto-config in XTIDECFG. The moment I start autoconfig, the computer freezes (no error message).

As a final resort, I will try to manually configure with interrupts disabled, but theoretically this shouldn't make any difference since both IRQ lines on that computer are free anyway.

Please let me know if you need further information.

[Diederik Huys]

The harddisk was connected to the wrong IDE connector. Strange that it worked for a while.