Chuck Guzis wrote: What I want to do is use a modern 2.5" IDE drive in a legacy machine. As I see it (aside from the physical cabling and mounting issues), the problems I am likely to face are related to the sizes of the drives (capacities) plus any changes in the logical interface. E.g., (very) early drives had to be initialized with their *fixed* geometries; that is no longer a requirement (as modern drives do translation). It looks like the 8/16 bit issue could be a killer -- but I *think* that won't be in this case...

Tom Peters wrote: Yes. What I have done in the past is to find the disk parameter table (one of the INT's points to it) and change an existing entry (for some geometry that I will likely NEVER use) to the geometry that I want. This alters the checksum of the device (obviously). So, now I need to find a couple of bytes elsewhere in memory that I can change to compensate for this. I find it easiest just to grab *another* disk entry and tweek that. (I could probably change any byte in those "sea of 0xFF" but I don't know FOR SURE that they represent "unused locations". But, I *do* know what the entries in the disk table are used for! :> I hacked a 340MB drive into my Portable 3 this way and it runs quite nicely.