[vcf-midatlantic] ISA BIOS extension board?
Richard Cini
rich.cini at gmail.com
Thu Feb 6 21:09:20 EST 2020
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
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Rich Cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
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