[vcf-midatlantic] ISA BIOS extension board?

[Richard Cini]

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 at lists.vcfed.org on behalf of vcf-midatlantic at 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 at 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 at 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