Victory!

The Sega TeraDrive Model 2 can now boot from the XTIDE setup all the way to a DOS command prompt. This is a fairly important little milestone.

Sega sold the Model 2 with two 3.5-inch floppy drives and no internal hard drive, so persistent mass storage has been one of the big limitations of this machine from the beginning. The XTIDE card gives the old 286 an 8-bit ISA route to modern ATA storage, and the TopSSD Disk on Module is finally behaving like a real boot drive.

Next stop: MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1. Ever notice that 6.22 is DOUBLE that of 3.11? Never mind that I’m actually installing 3.1… Accident? Conspiracy theorists, book your flights. The forum starts in six hours.

The XTIDE card really is an amazing piece of hardware. Thanks to the Vintage Computer community and the XTIDE developers for giving old machines like this a practical way to use modern storage.

Sources