26 Jan
2004
26 Jan
'04
4:43 a.m.
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'm trying to determine if there is a natural conflict before I venture
forth with this configuration. This may be a problem related to the PC
I'm trying to plug the card into because there are other oddities with the
IDE controller that is preventing the system from booting with 4 hard
drives installed (2 per IDE interface). It halts after it auto-recognizes
the drives on the primary controller. Weird.
Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.
I'm going to do more experimentation in the meantime. I'll get another PC
with ISA and PCI slots to work with, and will also find an old 386 to test
the MFM controller on to make sure it is working fine.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
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26 Jan
26 Jan
6:18 a.m.
I guess if you shut off the onboard controllers, freeing up IRQ 14 and
15 it should work. C800 should still work/act the same way to run the
MFM controller bios. Floppy is on IRQ 6 so no effect there.
Curt
Vintage Computer Festival 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'm trying to determine if there is a natural conflict before I venture
forth with this configuration. This may be a problem related to the PC
I'm trying to plug the card into because there are other oddities with the
IDE controller that is preventing the system from booting with 4 hard
drives installed (2 per IDE interface). It halts after it auto-recognizes
the drives on the primary controller. Weird.
Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.
I'm going to do more experimentation in the meantime. I'll get another PC
with ISA and PCI slots to work with, and will also find an old 386 to test
the MFM controller on to make sure it is working fine.
--
Curt Vendel & Karl Morris
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Atari Museum
http://www.atarimuseum.com
The Atari Explorer
http://www.atari-explorer.com
6:44 a.m.
On Monday 26 January 2004 13:43, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
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.
It partly depends on the boot rom on the MFM controller (I've had some
that were unhappy in a 'modern PC', and also depends on if you can
disable the onboard IDE and maybe floppy on the PC.
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).
That's because IDE and MFM hard drive controllers typically share the
same I/O ports. You should be able to leave your secondary IDE
enabled, but will almost definately have to disable your primary IDE
controller. Also, if there's a floppy controller on the same ISA card,
it'll conflict with the one on the motherboard, and you'll have to
disable one of the two.
I'm going to do more experimentation in the
meantime. I'll get
another PC with ISA and PCI slots to work with, and will also find an
old 386 to test the MFM controller on to make sure it is working
fine.
I'd bet the 386 will be much happier with the MFM controller.
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/
7:34 a.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf(a)siconic.com>
To: "Classic Computers Mailing List" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 1:43 PM
Subject: Old MFM controller on a PCI bus machine
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'm trying to determine if there is a natural conflict before I venture
forth with this configuration. This may be a problem related to the PC
I'm trying to plug the card into because there are other oddities with the
IDE controller that is preventing the system from booting with 4 hard
drives installed (2 per IDE interface). It halts after it auto-recognizes
the drives on the primary controller. Weird.
Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.
I'm going to do more experimentation in the meantime. I'll get another PC
with ISA and PCI slots to work with, and will also find an old 386 to test
the MFM controller on to make sure it is working fine.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Anything that gets plugged into the ISA bus (that isn't PnP) has a hard
wired IRQ, DMA, and address space (some or all can be changed with jumpers
depending on the vintage and device). If the MFM is using IRQ 14 or 15 then
the primary or secondary PCI IDE controller will have a conflict and not
work and wont boot. The PC architecture is pretty easy going so you wont
damage anything doing this. Go inside your BIOS and disable the built in IDE
controllers (if you cant change the IRQ on your MFM card). Next you can try
going to bios screen where the floppy and HD data is shown (usually first
menu) and manually type in the cylinder/heads/sectors data for the drive
your using (will have to be set to "USER" unless your lucky enough that the
bios tables has a setting for your exact drive in which case just select the
drive that matches yours). Assuming everything is ok you can then boot the
system to floppy and use dos to either format the drive for use or if the
drive was already formatted (with the current controller) and bootable it
will come alive. The last MFM drive I used was probably a 40mb drive on a
286 packard bell I had before IDE took over so its been over a decade since
I used one.
Generally devices on the PCI era motherboard can either be used or disabled,
they rarely will allow you to change important settings for HD controllers
(you have a choice of 2 irqs for serial ports and some changes for printer
ports but the rest is set). The last promise caching HD controller made for
the IDE PC bus (5030 model) came with a cable and ISA card that specifically
grabbed IRQ 14 or 15 from the ISA bus if you couldn't redirect your BIOS to
use the card instead of the built in IDE (a pain to setup).
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
10:07 a.m.
On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Joe R. wrote:
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.
Hmm, I wasn't aware of that. I'll check that.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]
10:37 a.m.
At 10:43 AM 1/26/2004, 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).
a 16 bit MFM controller and the IDE interface look identical to the system,
I've used 16 bit ISA MFM's in pentium systems, but have to disable the
onboard harddrive, and if the MFM has a floppy controller, I have had to
disable the onboard floppy as well.
4:46 p.m.
In the last month, I removed an ISA MFM (or possibly RLL) card from my
PC. I wasn't using the HD capabilites of the card, However. I was only
using the floppy controller, since I accidently fried the floppy
controller on the MB. I am also not using the MB IDE interface. I am
using an Adaptec scsi card.
I toyed around with a driver at one point that would allow a person to
mix mfm with modern drives. I can't recall what it was called, Though.
I think I found it on Simtel, but I'm not sure.
Chad Fernandez
Michigan, USA
Vintage Computer Festival 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'm trying to determine if there is a natural conflict before I venture
forth with this configuration. This may be a problem related to the PC
I'm trying to plug the card into because there are other oddities with the
IDE controller that is preventing the system from booting with 4 hard
drives installed (2 per IDE interface). It halts after it auto-recognizes
the drives on the primary controller. Weird.
Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.
I'm going to do more experimentation in the meantime. I'll get another PC
with ISA and PCI slots to work with, and will also find an old 386 to test
the MFM controller on to make sure it is working fine.
7636
days inactive
7637
days old
7 comments
7 participants
participants (7)
-
curt＠atarimuseum.com -
fernande＠internet1.net -
geoffr＠zipcon.net -
pat＠computer-refuge.org -
rigdonj＠cfl.rr.com -
teoz＠neo.rr.com -
vcf＠siconic.com