• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

NEC D5126 MFM and WD1002S-WX2

Q

QuantumII

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 12, 2008
Messages
503
Location
Oslo,Norway
Hi all

I am currently using a NEC D5126 with this 8-bit WD controller WD1002S-WX2

I am currently only able to utilize 10.1 MB of the HDD. (I have two identical drives, same results)

if I set the jumper to reflect 20 MB like the link says, there's no difference.. By fiddling with the jumbers further, I was able to get it to low-level format at a much slower pace (it took twice as much time as it usually does) but fdisk will only report "Error reading fixed disk"


Is there something I have missed here ? I am using the card's onboard bios btw, the mainboard bios (A pentium II) has both IDE controllers disabled, and all drives set to "None"

It works fine with 10MB but I think it's a waste not to be able to utilize the whole disk.
 
Last edited:
I think I have exactly the same drive/card combination sitting on a shelf back home.

The jumper settings on the card are a bit weird, and mine took a bit of setting up too.

If you can wait I can check when I get back home :)
 
OK, I dug it out. The drive is indeed a D5126, but the controller is a WD1002A-WX1.

The jumpers are set as follows:

W3 1-2
W4 2-3
W6 2-3
W7 1-2
W8 2-3

Hopefully you can translate those settings and apply to your card :)

The drive is a little annoying, as the mounting screws don't match the drive bays in an XT :lol:
 
Looking at the link you provided for the WD1002S-WX2, the third drive position (#2) matches the D5126: Jumper 1 & 3 closed, and Jumper 2 & 4 open.

However I note that you are using an XT controller on an AT motherboard. I've never tried that myself, but I expect a few issues associated with that. For example, the IRQ for the hard disk controller is 5 for the XT, but 14 for the AT.

And maybe you should try the BIOS arrangement the other way around: BIOS disabled on the WD1002S-WX2, and drive type set in CMOS setup.
 
thank you all :) I will look at this next week and try it out! the xt card seems to work just fine in the pentium II motherboard. i guess the PII board is backward compatible.

If I am not able to pull this one off, I will just get a WD1002A-WX1. They cost $9.95 on ebay, and it has an AT mode as well as an XT mode.
 
Last edited:
Make sure the card you have has the 'Super BIOS'. Only one of my 4 cards has it, and it makes drive configuration much better.

The card I am using with the D5126 has the older BIOS, so with those DIP settings you should have no problems.
 
Bad news! Today, when I switched on the P II machine with the MFM controller inside, it did not boot off the MFM HDD. Neither did the Debug C=G800:5 command do anything.

It was working when I shut the system down a few days ago, but today when I wanted to try the things we discussed here, it did not work at all anymore.. I did not touch any jumpers or anything :(

I can see that the card has two capacitors on it, maybe one of those went bad ? After all it's a card from 1985...

One day it was booting happily, next day dead as a rock.
 
QuantumII said:
Bad news! Today, when I switched on the P II machine with the MFM controller inside, it did not boot off the MFM HDD. Neither did the Debug C=G800:5 command do anything.

It was working when I shut the system down a few days ago, but today when I wanted to try the things we discussed here, it did not work at all anymore.. I did not touch any jumpers or anything :(

I can see that the card has two capacitors on it, maybe one of those went bad ? After all it's a card from 1985...

One day it was booting happily, next day dead as a rock.
Click to expand...

My bad, got the card working again. It was a tiny bit misalligned in the ISA slot. It works fine now, but still only 10 MB..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top