[vcf-midatlantic] ISA BIOS extension board?

[Richard Cini]

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