Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 24 July 2016 09:46
After much procrastination I finally ordered the parts to build Sergey's version of the XT IDE adapter.
Wow its been some hair pulling trial and error and lessons.
After lots of no-go, I finally reflashed the XI8088 board with the bios that does NOT have the XTIDE rom inside it.. wouldnt you know, BAM! The card starts working. hmm..
Apparently the official bios you can download from Sergey's site has an old XT IDE variant, not the one that matches his download...
So I repacked the Xi8088 BIOS and voilà, its working.
As part of the CF trouble shooting, I finally got around to trimming up the bus speed using the trimmer.
I managed to hit it exact using my trusty Racal Dana 1992 frequency counter and I even broke out the 10mhz rubidium standard for fun!
Now... Now we fight the pain of CF card geometry. I have no way of knowing what geometry the XTIDE BIOS see's. Under linux FDisk reports one set of geometry, sfdisk reports another.. and no amount of reflashing the CF card gets it to boot.
In the meantime, I managed to build the 128kb Xi8088 bios with the ide_xtl.bin bios, which is the XTIDE bios with the boot menu, its a 12kb rom instead of the basic 8kb ide_xt.bin
tags: Compact Flash, IDE, XT-CF-Lite, XTIDE, Xi8088
(dont include links in your comments.)