Help me to setup my A2386sx

[spirantho]

There's a page on floppies here:
http://home.arcor.de/kickstart/TKA/Tutorials/bridgeboard/2386floppies.html

Setting up a hard disk is covered in the manual and is complicated if you're using the Commodore system- there are better ways on the Aminet though for mounting partitions instead of files. However, I'd suggest putting an IDE disk on your IO card like you seem to have already. You should be able to jumper the HD as master, and go into the BIOS. From there you can set the HD type, probably setting it to AUTO (42 or something) is what you need. Then you can boot your MS-DOS install disk and install DOS. If you don't have an install disk you'll need to FDISK it first, remember.

Incidentally, I managed a new high "score" on 3DBench (http://ftp://ftp.eunet.bg/pub/simtelnet/msdos/vga/3dbench.zip) of about 15 I think it was on my pumped up A2386SX. That's using a 486SLC-2/50 with a Diamond Speedstar 24x graphics card (you need to take off the "Shadow JANUS" option in PCPrefs for this card) on a vanilla A1500.

[spirantho]

I think you can do it with a PC-Task hardfile but I'm not sure on that, and it takes some work. It'll also be a lot slower than a proper HD.

You could try Software Hut for the manual (http://www.softhut.com/books.html lists it at $9.95) - I do have the manual but I don't want to sell it I'm afraid. If I get time I may be able to copy it but I'm very busy at the moment. I'm not sure it has anything that'll help anyway with your IDE problem... did you definitely enable IDE on the ISA card? Can you show us a screenshot of your machine running MSD on the IRQ page?
Does your HDD spin up correctly when the BB starts (it should stay powered down until janus.library is started)?

[spirantho]

If he's booting from the MS-DOS install disk I think it'll do that for you won't it? As long as it's not an upgrade.
Probably best to boot into DOS though and run FDisk and see what happens. And MSD.