Unable to boot disks

HxC Floppy Emulator on IBM PC and compatible support
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warthan58
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Joined: Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:39 am

Unable to boot disks

Post by warthan58 »

I just got my SD HxC Rev F. It's connected to a 486. It seems to work correctly, electrically. The computer finds the drive during seek, and starts reading the boot disk. If I use a FreeDOS boot disk, I'll see about 4 rows of periods load, as the drive reads the disk, moves through tracks and sides, makes the sounds, and then it stops and the computer does nothing more. I've tried a DOS622 disk, your disk from https://hxc2001.com/download/floppy_driv ... Dos622.hfe and others. The DOS ones stop right away and the computer just has a blinking cursor.

I've tried it as Drive A, B, manually set the emulation mode on the front panel settings locking it down to IBM PC 1.44HD, cleared the EEPROM, flashed the Beta firmware, flashed the Stable firmware, changed floppy cables. I don't have another floppy controller (yet). I don't know what else to do. What do you think?

Jeff
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Re: Unable to boot disks

Post by Jeff »

Have you tried another / different SD Card ?

warthan58
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:39 am

Re: Unable to boot disks

Post by warthan58 »

I had not tried a different SD card just yet. I just got the ability to write floppy images to real floppies, and I acquired a floppy drive. It's exhibiting similar behavior. The physical drive responds to seek and starts booting, and then appears to stop. This time, the computer returns a non-bootable disk error. Normally, pressing a key should result in the drive trying to boot from the disk again, but instead, nothing happens. It's like the floppy channel is locked up, and that's consistent with what I was seeing on the HxC. I have two IDE cards, and I've tried them one at a time. One seems fine, except the floppy channel is dead, and the other does this. Now, I suspect it could be a bad board or even a processor. This all started because the processor was reading 120MHz when it should have read 133MHz, and I was trying to boot the FreeDOS Probe utility disk. I have a NOS MV035F being shipped to me, and an NOS Am5x86 P75. I'm going to be doing a lot of troubleshooting, but that's the fun part.

Jeff
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Re: Unable to boot disks

Post by Jeff »

This is may be a RAM issue. You maybe you should use an old Memtest86+ to test it.

warthan58
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Apr 10, 2021 1:39 am

Re: Unable to boot disks

Post by warthan58 »

I was able to eventually figure it out. Amazing as it sounds, my system had a bad processor. The system would act normally until it got to the floppy boot part. Good news is the HxC works perfectly.

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