26 Jan
2004
26 Jan
'04
11:01 p.m.
On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 12:27, Bill Girnius wrote:
Other than disabling the on board controllers, if
memory serves me
correctly, these boards used an onboard bios to insert the code to fool the
system to boot to these devices. You very likely need to discover what base
address the card loads at and make sure that area is reserved in the BIOS as
in use so nothing is shadowed there. Cards of this era typically used c0000
or 00000 for their boot code. THe caused problems on newer video cards as
they wanted the same base IO address space.
You could probably just pull the boot ROM. I'm not sure how Linux
handles MFM and RLL controllers, because I haven't used one for 10 years
or so, but I do know it supports them.
So basically the IRQ needs to be free, the controller
base address needs to
be free, (I.E. disabling the IDE controller) and the base memory address for
the onboard bios needs to be available, not only in the CMOS, but also
ensure no other devices are using it. You may have to dig in your parts bin
to find an older video card that dosn't grab so many addresses, and possibly
reconfigure the jumpers on your legacy disk controller to change it base
address to an unused area.
Perhaps you could modify the card to map addresses somewhere else.
Gordon.