Yup. Just put the rom in a NIC or similar. You can still use the onboard IDE interface. On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 9:47 PM Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

XT-IDE should work for you

On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 9:09 PM Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

...

All –

I have an old 486 “shoe box”/industrial PC from 1994 that I want to toss a larger hard drive in to use with some Windows 3.11 experiments I’m doing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have LBA BIOS extensions, so I’m capped at 540MB. I have one from WD, but it’s kind of creaky. So, I pulled out a 1.2G drive I had and installed OnTrack 9.57 which works fine. However, I feel kind of funny relying on the software wedge because you need to make custom boot diskettes, etc.

So, I was looking for an ISA card with the LBA BIOS extensions. I know they made them years ago, but I don’t know exactly what they are called, so I’m not having much success in locating one.

There may be other options like using an XT-IDE (if it does LBA; can’t tell) or maybe a different IDE card. Problem is that space is very limited (only 3 slots) and it has to be a low/short card to avoid interfering with the CPU fan.

Any other suggestions/advice welcome. Right now I’m going to run with the 540MB drive I have, but I would like to find a better solution.

Thanks!

Rich

--

Rich Cini

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini

http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32

-- Jason Perkins 313 355 0085 Sent from my iPhone

Just to close this out a bit. I found a Kingston ISA Ethernet card in the attic and it has a ROM socket. So, I burned a 27C128 with the 2.0B3 XTBIOS and it works. So, that's good. What I've found is that the controller and/or BIOS is especially picky as to which drive is master and which is slave. I have a mix of older Maxtor, WD and Quantum drives of various sizes (345MB, 540MB, 1.2GB, 2.6GB). The Maxtor 345 is the boot drive right now and the one I'm trying to copy. No combination of master/slave jumpers seems to work. The only combination that works is the Maxtor drive as master and a 1GB CF card (in a CF->IDE adapter) as the slave. So, I'm going to try to two-step it and see if I can copy the CF card back to a hard drive. If not, I guess I'll stick with the CF card. At least it will be quieter :-) Rich -- Rich Cini http://www.classiccmp.org/cini http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32 On 2/7/20, 9:31 AM, "vcf-midatlantic on behalf of Jason Perkins via vcf-midatlantic" <vcf-midatlantic-bounces@lists.vcfed.org on behalf of vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote: Yup. Just put the rom in a NIC or similar. You can still use the onboard IDE interface. On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 9:47 PM Dean Notarnicola via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > XT-IDE should work for you > > On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 9:09 PM Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic < > vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote: > > > All – > > > > > > > > I have an old 486 “shoe box”/industrial PC from 1994 that > > I want to toss a larger hard drive in to use with some Windows 3.11 > > experiments I’m doing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have LBA BIOS > extensions, > > so I’m capped at 540MB. I have one from WD, but it’s kind of creaky. So, > I > > pulled out a 1.2G drive I had and installed OnTrack 9.57 which works > fine. > > However, I feel kind of funny relying on the software wedge because you > > need to make custom boot diskettes, etc. > > > > > > > > So, I was looking for an ISA card with the LBA BIOS > > extensions. I know they made them years ago, but I don’t know exactly > what > > they are called, so I’m not having much success in locating one. > > > > > > > > There may be other options like using an XT-IDE (if it does LBA; can’t > > tell) or maybe a different IDE card. Problem is that space is very > limited > > (only 3 slots) and it has to be a low/short card to avoid interfering > with > > the CPU fan. > > > > > > > > Any other suggestions/advice welcome. Right now I’m going to run with the > > 540MB drive I have, but I would like to find a better solution. > > > > > > > > Thanks! > > > > > > > > Rich > > > > > > > > -- > > > > Rich Cini > > > > http://www.classiccmp.org/cini > > > > http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32 > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- Jason Perkins 313 355 0085 Sent from my iPhone

Thanks David. I bought a cheap, new NIC with a ROM socket and I’m going to burn XTIDEBIOS to it. I’m going to try a prebuilt version first and then maybe build 2.0 from source. Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef> ________________________________ From: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic-bounces@lists.vcfed.org> on behalf of David Gesswein via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> Sent: Friday, February 7, 2020 10:32 AM To: Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic Cc: David Gesswein Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] ISA BIOS extension board? On Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 09:09:20PM -0500, Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

So, I was looking for an ISA card with the LBA BIOS extensions. I know they made them years ago, but I don???t know exactly what they are called, so I???m not having much success in locating one.

I remember using them back in the day. I found a couple in my stuff. One is a LBA PRO by Unicore software and the other is AMIDISK V1.1 IDE extension by American Megatrends. I think these were to allow larger disks but could be to support IDE or a second IDE since in the same bag is an IDE board without BIOS on it. Looks like you can by a modern version https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_ROM_Board https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lo-tech-8-bit-ISA-ROM-Card-for-8-Bit-ISA-Assembled-... https://code.google.com/archive/p/xtideuniversalbios/