Getting Hardcard 20 to work with Compaq Portable II

Hi all,

Yesterday I repaired a Compaq Portable II with dual disk drives. It's not in a great condition; lots of shorted tantalum capacitors and sticky drive doors. But it works now for the most part.

However, I can't get the Hardcard 20 that was in it to work. Maybe it's broken, but maybe I'm just doing something wrong.

One thing I did was of course pull the CMOS battery of 1989 out, so I have no info on the original configuration.

Symptoms:

• After memory and floppy tests, the BIOS then hangs with a little static + in the top right corner, for about 5 minutes. Then the computer continues to boot.
• I changed the jumper on the card from PC to XT, but then it immediately (without the long pause) shows error 1701.
• When I try to install the Hardcard with the disk image I found on this forum, it shows a message saying that it can't communicate with the Hardcard. So apparently the installer doesn't find it at all.
• The drive does spin up. It doesn't seek but that could be because the controller card hasn't initialized.

I have configured the BIOS as follows:

• Drive A and B 360K floppy drives
• No HDD's (so no C and D drive)

I have tried setting drive C to Type 2 but that didn't make a difference.

The jumper on the Hardcard was set to 'PC' (not 'XT') and I think that that is correct, since the Portable II doesn't have a factory HDD card installed.

Any suggestions? This card looks really cool and I would love to get it to operate correctly.

Thanks!