1 Feb
2006
1 Feb
'06
9:19 a.m.
On 2/1/2006 at 7:11 AM mbbrutman-cctalk at brutman.com wrote:
I like the BIOS ROM extension better myself, but what I
grabbed is what I
grabbed ... It occurred to me last night that I had not changed the CMOS
settings for the drive, so the nice 600+MB IDE drive that I stuck in there
was being treated like the old full-height monster that it replaced.
Today's project will be to put a Promise EIDE MAX in a spare slot - that
will give it the BIOS extension that it needs to recognize larger drives.
I'm
also going to run DIAGs on the beast and work out some
other problems.
I remember well getting my first 1224 cylinder MFM drive (Miniscribe, I
think) to go with my Faraday ATease 286 mobo and realizing that the BIOS
wouldn't get me past the 1024 cylinder mark, leaving almost 20% of the
drive unusable. This was in the bad old MS-DOS days, so I eventually just
wrote a DOS device driver that gave me a partition with the remaining
capacity. With a WD-1006 RLL card, I was looking at a whopping 250 MB!
Seems kind of strange now that one can buy little bitty flash cartridges
with a gig or more on them that are smaller than the power connector on the
drive.
Remember, you can still run OS/2 1.x on that AT box.
I think a lot of very serviceable older hardware goes into the landfill
because of performance issues that aren't necessarily related to preocessor
speed. Often, just increasing the memory and adding a faster (ATA6) hard
disk controller can make a huge difference on older Pentium I and II
machines. And it's these older machines that still have a few ISA slots
for older peripherals. I've just finished setting up a 200 MHz PII box
this way with Win98, RH9 and Win2K. Performance for most mundame
programmer-type tasks is very adequate.
Cheers,
Chuck