A2286 Bridgeboard w/XTIDE - fix CF MBR w/o floppy?

[hawkman]

I've got an A2500 with a A2286 bridgeboard fully kitted out with soundblaster, VGA card and critically XT-IDE. It was working great a year ago when I played with it last. It was a battle getting it working and I posted a few times here.

However now when I boot up the bridgeboard, it gets stuck on "Booting C>>C" in XT-IDE. I'm pretty sure the MBR was damaged on the CF card somehow, but I'm a bit stuck on how to fix it. Somehow I've forgotten a step from when I set it up a year ago and despite trying to re-research things, I can't quite remember how I got it working originally.

I know that I built an autoboot hard drive image and I just tested it in UAE and it still works. Theoretically, if I could boot from that image on the real amiga, I'd be able to "sys" the CF card drive and get it booting again or in the worst case, reformat it. But my understanding is that this isn't possible - the A2286 manual says that the bridgeboard disables autoboot drive files when a real controller is in place. Now, whether XT-IDE counts as a "real" controller or not is a question I have - I have not configured any of the CMOS hard drive settings so I'm just booting from the XT-IDE BIOS.

I don't have a floppy drive connected to this machine and clearly I figured out how to do this in the past without one. Any tips on reminding me what I seem to have forgotten how to do?

Thanks!

[lesta_smsc]

Reading online, it suggests some fixes for this type of issue with other systems:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=85773

https://minuszerodegrees.net/xtide/X...20Problems.htm

I wonder if any of these posts could help trigger your memory as to the solution you seek?

[hawkman]

Useful links and I took a step back to think about the issue. It turns out that the easiest way to do this - which isn't especially easy - is the following:

1. Install VirtualBox on a modern PC
2. Take the CF card from the XTIDE and mount it on the modern PC and copy all the files off of it
3. Create a RAW disk for the CF card, as administrator:

'C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe' internalcommands createrawvmdk --filename newcf.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive2

4. Run VirtualBox as administrator and set up the RAW disk as the hard drive for a MS-DOS virtual machine
5. Grab MS-DOS install floppy images and put disk 1 in the virtual floppy
6. Boot from floppy. I tried to fix the MBR but something had really messed it up, so instead of debugging it I just reformatted and re-installed DOS.
7. Test boot from hard drive. Shutdown VirtualBox.
8. *Important* Eject and remount the CF card. Windows is not made aware of changes done in VirtualBox and corruption will occur if you try to write to the CF without doing this.
9. Copy back all the original files from the backup.
10. Eject and install into the Amiga/XTIDE.
11. Boot and enjoy the power of the 80286

This was not easy to figure out (again?) so hopefully this helps others and possibly myself in a year or two!

[hawkman]

Side note, after getting the disk bootable, using VirtualBox is overkill for accessing the contents. It's easier to just mount the CF as a DosBox drive. The main issue is that VirtualBox RAW drives aren't synced with Windows and it's very easy to corrupt the drive.