On 05/20/2014 02:31 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
You're going to need an ISA IDE adapter with its own BIOS to use with an
IDE drive or an IDE-to-CF card adapter (Promise made some of those).
Strictly you don't ened a BIOS extension. IDE drives were designed ot be
compatible wit hthe Western Digital controller in the original PC/AT. If
you can modify the dirve geometry tabel [1] then it will work with the
drivers in the BIOS ROMs.
Up to a point perhaps. But don't expect to get every byte of a 330GB
IDE drive. It might work with small IDEs (bad idea; they seem to be
falling like flies) or a small CF card.
My experience is that fr larger disks, the BIOS routines will correctly
access the first <n> MBytes (the vlaue of n was famous at one point, I've
long forgotten it). OSes that don't sue the BIOS vaiurly obviosuly don't
use BIOS extensions either, so they work fine with a plain bus adapter.
One Gotcha is that often the BIOS is used to boot jsut abotu any OS. So
what I did on this machine as to have a few small MSDOS partitions, then
the rest of the disk up to that boundary as linux partition contianing
tyhe root file system/kernel (which can be read by the BIOS with no
problems, so it can be booted from) and the test of the disk as a larger
linus partition mounted as /usr. The fact that hte latter can't be read
by the BIOS doesn't matter.
In any case, you're going to need a PATA controller. Best to get one
s/controller/bus interface/
with support built-in.
That depends on what you can find, and whether you like undocuemtned bits
of firmware in your system.
-tony