why not consider testing that effort with ms. dos 7.1 instead of dos 6?
Karen
On Wed, 23 Jun 2021, Jon Brase wrote:
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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