Tandy 1000HX Troubles booting with Lo-Tech XT-IDE controller - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / beginners

author: servo
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 07:39:20 pm
content: First I would like to introduce my self. I am new to the forum but have been a part of the arcade community for over a decade now. I purchased a Tandy 1000HX off ebay last year. It was the same model i had when i was a kid so i decided to take a ride down memory lane. I got a good deal on one , untested but in good shape. The computer was working and I enjoyed the full rush of nostalgia at first but I knew that I wanted to expand it in ways i couldn't back in the late 80's. I put the project on hold for a while until i cam across a really good deal on a CM-11 monitor. I grabbed it and began playing with the computer again. So i began looking for a way to expand the memory to 640k, as the computer i bought did not come with the memory plus expansion card. As most of you probably know those cards have become almost impossible to get and if you can find one they are very expensive. I came across a member of this forums Tindie page, Djos. I purchased a ISA expansion card from him and bought the Lo-Tech 1mb memory expansion board and populated it myself. It was a fun project and the board and the adapter worked flawlessly.Around Christmas I decided to run some of the old Radio Shack Christmas demos' for my kids when i started having problems with my Floppy drive. I opened it up to clean it but in doing so i think i damaged the read/write heads. This started an odyssey that im still going though till this day. I reached out to Djos, who by the way is one of the greatest guys i've come across in all my years of being in this kind of hobby. I talked to him about the options i had in replacing the floppy. He suggested the gotek but I wanted to keep a real floppy on the system. So i deiced on both and I would also look into a Lo-Tech XT-IDE controller as well. I got a suitable 1.44mb drive off ebay and with a lot of help from Djos got both of them running. I then turned to the XT-IDE and the CF card adapter so i could boot from a c: drive. Something I would never have dreamed of when i was 12 or 13 years old.I currently have a real floppy as my A: drive, the Gotek as a B: drive and the CF card thought the Lo-Tech XT-IDE controller as my C: drive. I have followed Djos' instructions to the letter, among other sources i have found online and this is where i currently am at. I can install Dos, or anything for that matter to the C: drive from the floppy or the gotek but i can not boot to DOS 5.0 on the C: drive without having the Tandy 1000HX setup disk in the A: drive at boot up. If i do not have the disk in the drive it will search for the A and C drives, not boot from C and boot up to DOS 2.11 that is installed in the computers BIOS. I have ran SETUPHX and have set the drive to boot from disk. But the computer will not boot to the C: drive unless the setup disk is in the A: drive. I will get a message saying "Non System Disk.Booting from Hard Disk" and then I will get a C:\ promptI have bugged Djos for the past few weeks with a ton of PM's though the Tindie web page and dont want to bother him anymore. Im sure he will respond to this post and tell me that its his pleasure. I was hoping to give him a break but I very much welcome his input in this thread. Thanks again for all the Help and the great products that he makes to keep these machines alive. The dude is really a class act and a credit to your community.One of the other things that is going wrong is that I can't use the Gotek if I have a disk in the A: drive. and when i use the gotek the read write heads on the Floppy drive are moving around as if its being read though the A: drive. This is all very strange. Any Help would be greatly appreciated.Sorry this is so long. I can upload pics and links to videos of whats going on if that helps. Im at work now but can do that tonight. Thanks again for listening.Servo