11 Jan
2010
11 Jan
'10
10:57 p.m.
On 11 Jan 2010 at 23:07, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
Uh? Had these multi-id controllers have their own BIOS
extension? My
understanding is that the BIOS can handle these--all it needs to know
is the geometry. (And this is because the BIOS uses C/H/S addressing
instead of linear addresses.)
Some of the early ones did indeed have their own BIOSes.
Some of the early IDE drives even had a translation mode that gave
you 17 sectors per track (I don't know if your current one does).
Some motherboard BIOSes pretty much had a "take it or leave it"
table of values, but I don't know if that extends to yours (The IBM
5170, for example gave you a limited set of choices).
Later motherboards knew about IDE (and ESDI) drives and would issue
the IDENTIFY command and read the drive geometry directly. Earlier
boards made to work only with MFM controllers obviously couldn't do
this.
You might try going to type 47 and hitting a few keys to see if the
BIOS will allow you to enter values--one of the old Award BIOS
versions allowed that. One of my Award BIOSes has NONE, 1-46 and
USER, for example.
It's also possible that another maker's BIOS will work, but you
haven't identified the chipset for the board, so it's hard to say if
anything readily available can be used.
Cheers,
Chuck