I need help with setting up a 486 DOS machine

[vintagegameQT]

Hi, I want to set up a 486 DOS machine with Packet Bell PB410A motherboard however it doesn't seem to detect the hard drive automatically, how do I set up the bios so I have a hard drive to format and install DOS?

[Arjen42]

At bootup press F2 to run the setup utility.

Or configure the emulated PC to have a SCSI controller. You don't need to setup the hard drive in the BIOS if you have a SCSI controller. Boot times appear to be slower because of the SCSI BIOS and you probable need to run the setup utility to configure memory size and floppy drives.

[vintagegameQT]

At bootup press F2 to run the setup utility.

Or configure the emulated PC to have a SCSI controller. You don't need to setup the hard drive in the BIOS if you have a SCSI controller. Boot times appear to be slower because of the SCSI BIOS and you probable need to run the setup utility to configure memory size and floppy drives.

I ended up with an AMI WinBios 484 motherboard that was much less confusing to set up, I'll try what you said thanks. I did press F2 however I didn't who what to select as C drive!

[Arjen42]

I ended up with an AMI WinBios 484 motherboard that was much less confusing to set up, I'll try what you said thanks. I did press F2 however I didn't who what to select as C drive!

At one time I had a 486DX2 66 MHz with the same kind of BIOS. It's kinda my one my favorites in PCem. (Guess which is the other one...)

When creating a hard drive image file in PCem you can choose from a list or specify cylinders, heads, and sectors per track. When a BIOS doesn't have auto detection, you will have to remember this or write this down. (Just like when installing hard drive at those times.)

Most of the time I use type 2 (20MB) for 8086,8088 PC's and type 4 (60MB) for 286,386,486 PC's. Most 8086/8088 PC's don't work with IDE controllers so they only support a few types and don't have a BIOS setup anyway. Type 2 is a good choice because 20 MB is enough most of the time.

Early 286,386,486 don't have auto detection so it's easy to remember one of the lower numbers. Most Pentium and newer boards have auto detection at startup, so it's no problem to configure a larger drive like 500 MB or more. (Older computers had problems getting hard drives bigger than 540 MB to work. The WinBios computer I had, ran a 850 MB drive without flawlessly.)

[leilei]

On some of the autodetection boards you'll need to manually detect and configure a drive and then enable LBA or LARGE elsewhere to use larger drives. Earlier 486 boards likely won't have the choice.

I prefer the AMI WinBIOS for socket 3 because that's what my VIP 486 was (though the emulated board isn't VIP), also I did have experience with a SCSI-loaded Award 486 at one point... OEM bioses on Phoenix tend to be the most frustrating to configure

[vintagegameQT]

I ended up with an AMI WinBios 484 motherboard that was much less confusing to set up, I'll try what you said thanks. I did press F2 however I didn't who what to select as C drive!

At one time I had a 486DX2 66 MHz with the same kind of BIOS. It's kinda my one my favorites in PCem. (Guess which is the other one...)

When creating a hard drive image file in PCem you can choose from a list or specify cylinders, heads, and sectors per track. When a BIOS doesn't have auto detection, you will have to remember this or write this down. (Just like when installing hard drive at those times.)

Most of the time I use type 2 (20MB) for 8086,8088 PC's and type 4 (60MB) for 286,386,486 PC's. Most 8086/8088 PC's don't work with IDE controllers so they only support a few types and don't have a BIOS setup anyway. Type 2 is a good choice because 20 MB is enough most of the time.

Early 286,386,486 don't have auto detection so it's easy to remember one of the lower numbers. Most Pentium and newer boards have auto detection at startup, so it's no problem to configure a larger drive like 500 MB or more. (Older computers had problems getting hard drives bigger than 540 MB to work. The WinBios computer I had, ran a 850 MB drive without flawlessly.)

thanks for this info, currently I'm happy with this AMI board I managed to install and run a lot of MS-DOS games on it with no issues I needed this machine for late 1980s games since they run way too fast on my emulated Pentium 75.

[vintagegameQT]

On some of the autodetection boards you'll need to manually detect and configure a drive and then enable LBA or LARGE elsewhere to use larger drives. Earlier 486 boards likely won't have the choice.

I prefer the AMI WinBIOS for socket 3 because that's what my VIP 486 was (though the emulated board isn't VIP), also I did have experience with a SCSI-loaded Award 486 at one point... OEM bioses on Phoenix tend to be the most frustrating to configure

I was confused why even I had to configure the bios to detect the hard drive, I have no real world experience with the actual hardware

[Greywolf]

I remember having to do that everything had to be inputted manually in bios that was my first computer build from scratch had dos 6.22 and win 3.11 took me ages to figure out what was going wrong and internet was pretty lame back then to search it lol

[vintagegameQT]

I remember having to do that everything had to be inputted manually in bios that was my first computer build from scratch had dos 6.22 and win 3.11 took me ages to figure out what was going wrong and internet was pretty lame back then to search it lol

you definitely had a more difficult situation, yesterday I managed to set up a Packet Bell machine with 512 mb HDD thanks to the info I was given here.