SD hard drive on A2386SX

[orcish75]

Hi Curtis,

I went down exactly the same road as you a couple of years ago, only with an A2286 bridgeboard. In the end, I used a Soundblaster 16 with an IDE port and XTIDE v1.5 in an ISA network card bootrom socket. I also struggled for a while to get it working properly, but in the end managed to get it to work. Check out this thread for more information: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=60625

The crucial thing to getting the XTIDE bios to work properly is getting the checksum byte correct. I've found the most compatible method is to use a 27C128 EPROM as most network cards support a minimum boot rom size of 16KB. Place the checksum byte at the end of the 8KB image (at address 0x1FFF) and then pad the rest up to 16KB (0x3FFF) with zeros.

I can setup the XTIDE bios, with checksums etc and post it here if you want. Just let me know how you want it set up, V1.5 or V2.03 beta, and must it have the primary and secondary IDE controllers enabled or just the primary or just the secondary? If you're gonna use a soundcard like I did, only setting up the secondary is necessary. Having the primary and secondary setup is fine, just that it's gonna take longer to boot while the primary times out as it doesn't exist.

[orcish75]

Bugger! If you have the original XTIDE card, it makes it somewhat more difficult! Are you using a VGA card or the Amiga display? If you're using a VGA card, try change it for another one, perhaps the VGA bios and XTIDE bios conflict with each other.

[orcish75]

Excellent, at least you're making progress! Yup, the checksum is a b#%ch, just about all of my XTIDE issues were because of it. Try the different versions of the XTIDE bios as well, generally I've had better success with V1.5, but have V2.03Beta in a couple of my old PCs.