There is a very good use for bios on the controller card. It
allow use of large hard drives on older computers whos bios
won't support the large drives. These IDE controller card are
available for $20 up at http://www.jameco.com and I'm sure
many other suppliers carry them too.
On 2 Apr 01, at 20:57, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
> Hi Karen:
>
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2001 18:30:04 -0500 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > hi folks,
> > no idea where to post j ustnow, if this makes it i g ues i will know.
> > i understand that you can find hd controler cards that have their own bios
> > on them? if so where and how difficult are they to install.
> > serious answers only please. i am using dos 6.22 *not windows!*
> > thanks,
> > karen
> > Live Long and Prosper
> > Karen Lewellen, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Hi Karen:
>
> In the days before computers were equipped with a BIOS on the motherboard,
> (I am speaking of the days of the XTs) you had to get a controller card
> that was capable of holding some setup data specifying such things as your
> hard drive type, number of heads, cylinders, sectors, and tracks, etc.
> Some types of controller cards had this data permanently fixed on a ROM on
> the controller card. Your hard drive had to be one that was perfectly
> matched for the controller card. The controller card would work only with
> one specific hard drive type. Assuming you had the right hard drive and the
> right controller card, installation of both was a snap. There were other
> types of controller cards produced in those days which had some kind of
> flash rom. Your hard drive settings had to be programmed into the flash
> rom by running some kind of debug program that directly addressed the flash
> rom on the controller card. There were debug programs published in manuals
> for various hard drives. I actually did this once, and to my grand
> amazement it even worked! You could say this flash rom was really some kind
> of BIOS of sorts. AFAIK, all of these controller cards of the type I am
> describing here were eight bit cards and they were for MFM hard drives and
> all of them were for XTs. If you have a BIOS on the motherboard, as in the
> case of an AT, then you would have no use for a BIOS on the controller card.
>
> All the best,
>
> Sam Heywood
>
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