Continuing a conversation from back in March, I took Liam's suggestion
of using a PCI SATA adapter. I ended up getting a card with a SiI3114
chipset. I actually got the card a while ago, but took my sweet time
getting around to installing it.
The good: The card is bootable, and with only a SATA drive on it the
machine will boot Linux and FreeDOS. Linux will recognize both SATA and
IDE drives in any combination and configuration.
The bad: My configuration includes MS-DOS 6, which will not see any
drives on the SATA card at all, so a mixed configuration is required,
despite Liam's warnings. This does have consequences:
The ugly: If the IDE drive is mounted on the secondary IDE channel,
neither MS nor FreeDOS will see the IDE drive. If the IDE drive is
mounted on the primary IDE channel, the SATA card is not bootable (the
BIOS seems to try booting from the primary IDE channel and then gives up
without passing boot off to the SATA card, so Grub has to be on the IDE
disk), but at least both MS and FreeDOS will see the IDE disk. FreeDOS
itself will still see the SATA disk. However, in this configuration
FreeDOS fdisk claims to find no fixed disks. MS fdisk claims a bogus HDD
size, so only Linux tools can be used to reliably partition the disk
(despite giving dire warnings about messing with FAT volumes containing
bootable MS-DOS systems). My configuration includes Win95 (though I can
run most of what I'd run there on other machines, so it's not as
critical). Win95 has no drivers for the SATA card (earliest drivers are
WDM drivers, so Win98 at the earliest). Win98 is supposed to support the
card, but its installer seems to run completely under DOS, and doesn't
give an opportunity to load drivers before installing, so it only sees
the IDE disk. Because of my BIOS's limitations in dealing with large
drives, it will take some finagling of partition sizes and locations to
allow both DOS 6 and Win98 to boot from the IDE disk whilst giving both
a decent amount of space (though hopefully Win98 will be able to use a
FAT32 partition on the SATA disk as a data/program disk once the drivers
are installed).
Still, despite everything under "the ugly", the most crucial elements of
my configuration are up and running with a lot more space than they used
to have.
Jon Brase
On 3/11/21 4:37 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
I do not see any info about what the host machine is. If it is new
enough to have PCI slots, then a SATA controller with a BIOS of its
own should, in theory, bypass all this nightmare. Citation with model
recommendations:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62958
A firmware-equipped SATA controller (i.e. not some cheap thing that
just adds additional ports and is not bootable) will appear to the PC
as a SCSI controller and its firmware will take over the INT13 BIOS
calls for disk access completely.
If you do decide to go that route, though, I advise _against_ mixing
SATA and EIDE/PATA disks. Let the SATA controllers' firmware take over
completely and do not use the motherboard's EIDE channels at all.
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