26 Jan
2004
26 Jan
'04
8:34 a.m.
At 10:43 AM 1/26/04 -0800, you wrote:
I haven't played with MFM hard drives and controllers in a LONG time
(about 10 years now) so I have some questions.
I'll start off easy. Should there be any reason an old 16-bit ISA MFM
controller won't work properly in a Pentium-class PC with ISA and PCI
slots? I imagine I would just have to configure the BIOS to reserve the
proper interrupt (I believe it's 14, correct?) for the MFM controller.
I did all this but the MFM controller wreaked havoc on the system. It
killed the on-board floppy disk and IDE controllers (not physically killed
but basically disabled them and the system couldn't boot).
I wonder. If the new systems aren't designed with the plug-in controllers
in mind is the usual memory address for the controller still available?
Perhaps the new bigger motherboard BIOS is using the addresses that the
controller expects to have available.
Also. Have you tried slowing down the clock on the ISA slots? A lot of
the newer (10 years?) machines run the slots at faster than the old offical
rate of 8 MHz. But you can vary the frequency in many (all?) of them using
the BIOS setup.
Joe