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Ibm 5160 + Tmc-850

Z

zebedee

New Member
Joined
Oct 26, 2007
Messages
4
Hi Folks!

Trying to get a Future Domain TMC-850IBM card to work in an IBM PC XT however, I'm not having much luck. After the RAM test, I get the error '1047000 221' The machine then boots from floppy and fdisk is unable to see the drive. There are no other cards fitted besides the floppy & display controllers and I've tried various drives (20mb - 1Gb)

Any suggestions?

Cheers,
Dave

PS. The BIOS on the card is version 1.1
 
Did the Future Domain card BIOS show up while the machine was booting? If so, what did it say? Usually it will tell you what devices it sensed on the SCSI chain.

Another option is to try the software drivers for the card after the machine boots from floppy. There is test software that will tell you if the card is found, and what devices are attached to the card. I would start with this software first.
 
I have the TMC850IBM card. It uses the V8.5 BIOS which is not compatible with 8088/8086 type computers even though it is an 8-bit card. You'll need to get a dump of the V8.2 BIOS and burn a new ROM for the card if you must be able to boot from it.
 
Anonymous Coward said:
I have the TMC850IBM card. It uses the V8.5 BIOS which is not compatible with 8088/8086 type computers even though it is an 8-bit card. You'll need to get a dump of the V8.2 BIOS and burn a new ROM for the card if you must be able to boot from it.
Click to expand...

Strictly speaking, the 8.4 / 8.5 BIOSes are XT compatible, but the XT's motherboard BIOS needs to support booting from a hard drive. Most don't (they leave it up to the controller BIOS).
 
That doesn't make sense.

On an XT the hard disk controller always provides the BIOS ROM support for booting from the hard disk. The Xebec controller and all other SCSI controllers provide the BIOS extension to do this.

It is not until the AT that IBM moved the hard disk BIOS into the main motherboard BIOS.
 
mbbrutman said:
That doesn't make sense.

On an XT the hard disk controller always provides the BIOS ROM support for booting from the hard disk. The Xebec controller and all other SCSI controllers provide the BIOS extension to do this.
Click to expand...

On a genuine IBM, yes. Some XT clones put the hard drive support in the main BIOS ROM. It's generally these ones that can boot from a TMC-850 with BIOS 8.4 or 8.5, because they know to look for a boot record on drive 80h even if the add-on ROM doesn't.

(That's the problem with the TMC 8.4 / 8.5 BIOS, as I recall: it adds support for drive 80h (or 81h, 82h...), but doesn't check for a boot record on it, assuming that the motherboard BIOS will).
 
Ah, ok - that is an excellent clarification. I was assuming that all XT class machines relied on the BIOS ROM extension to provide the BIOS. I would normally call a BIOS that can do that an AT class BIOS.
 
Thanks for the info / help on this one. I've tested the card in a newer machine and it seems to boot and work fine but still unable to use it in the XT. Does anybody have an image of the 8.2 BIOS ?

Cheers,
Dave
 
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