🚀 go-pugleaf

Can someone please help ?

I had happily been running a system with an EIDE controller with 2 
drives setup as master & slave without any problems for around 6 months.

Twice I had hit a problem while in Windoze; something like 'unable to 
write to c:' ...  the system hung and then it would only reboot from 
floppy, although all the disk contents appeared to be fine.  I 
partitioned the disk, reformatted and reinstalled, and everything was 
fine again.  The second time it happened I managed to simply re-write 
the boot sectors with a disk utility (Disk Doctor I think).

The problem has now occurred a 3rd time, and no matter what I do I 
cannot get my system to boot from the hard drive.  I have done the 
usual "FDISK/MBR" to write the master boot record; "SYS A: C:" to 
re-write the system files; re-partitioned; re-formatted; re-installed --- 
all without success.

The message I get is simply:

	Non-System disk or disk error
	Replace and press any key when ready

I can boot from floppy and then run everything from drive C: with no 
noticable problems (except I can't from boot (A) drive in Windoze - 
don't how it knows whwre I booted from ?).

- I tried another hard drive and exactly the same problem.

- I have 'cleared' and reset all the CMOS settings.

- I went back to my original single drive and it gives the message:

	NO ROM BASIC
	SYSTEM HALTED


- I installed OS/2 Warp and it booted from the hard drive no problem !!

I'm at a total loss here - what can it be ?  Why will OS/2 boot and not 
DOS, do they boot in a significantly different way ?

I'm now assumming that the problem may be my controller card .. is this 
likely ? Why is only the boot affected ?.  Unfortunately I got rid of 
my old card when I upgraded to a VESA Multi I/O card with EIDE, but I 
really only upgraded for the buffered serial ports.

My bios has a 'hard disk auto detect' which returns the correct details 
for the drives, and I understand that DOS limits the cylinders to 1024. 
I don't think the bios has LBA (or whatever) and I don't use any fancy 
disk utilities to increase the disk beyond the 528Mb limit.


My system details are:

 486DX  8Mb ram   m/board - unknown (BIOTEQ ?) Fountain Highmead

 American Megatrends Inc 1992 BIOS (AMI)

 Quantum Maverick 540 master drive;  Western Digital Caviar 250 slave

 Pine PT-627 Enhanced VESA Super IDE I/I card

 DOS 6.22   Windows FWG 3.11


Apologies for the length, please someone put me out my misery.


Many TIA

-- 
 / still twiddling will all my bits    $:-)    \
 \ John Hamilton (South Queensferry, Scotland) /