Hi, After lots of testing and lots of help from Jack Ellis and Eric, I was able more or less to overcome the roadblocks:
a) Gibberish after boot: use only JEMMEX, and/or replace HIMEMX with XMGR /T0 (or /B /T0 and then /T0 per documentation) b)Freedos 1.2 pre22 not booting after installation, requiring sys c: from 2031 bootdisks (sys 2.6) to workaround see next point c) Lack of BIOS support for secondary IDE I installed EZ-BIOS using the hard drive manufacturer's tools found at http://members.shaw.ca/rinocanada/hdutils.htm Though aimed to address BIOS drive size limitations, in my cases it added support for the secondary IDE, and removed the need for workaround after freedos installation failed to boot c)rawrite3/hard drive manufacturer's tools complaining about crossing 64K DMA barrier while wring to floppy: workaround 1 (only for rawrite3, fails for larger programs such as hard drive tools): load lowdma.sys early on in config.sys, then lh rawrite3 (slow) workaround 2 (for both): patched lowdma.sys from Eric that removed the requirement to use lh (also slow) workaround 3: boot from windows 98 bootdisk (considerably faster) d)after rawrite3/hard drive tools writing to disk, dir a: still slows the old files/directories this caused some confusion if the tools did the job right with the workarounds, but reboot proved they work. Windows 98 bootdisk does not suffer from this issue e)SB16 IDE CDROMs not being detected by UIDE/UDVD2 Probably I did something wrong the card jumpers or the cabling, as I failed to replicate the problem. Once it is configured to use the tertiary IDE channel, it worked fine. This is with a CT 2290 "plug-n-play" card that needs to be configured from software for sound related settings with the diagnose.exe tool - IDE IRQ and channel still need jumpers. I failed to get it to work with a similar CT2910 according to PCB, CT2291 according to the sticker SB16 card with a very similar but not identical layout, and with jumpers for everything. Perhaps the card IDE is problematic as sound works - I did not have time to test if Linux performs better (Windows bootdisk and creative IDE drivers also fail). f)UMC8672 dos driver support I found dos drivers for my VLB controller (PM-67B, UMC8672 based) at http://driverzone.com/drivers/umc/control/um8672.htm. Unfortunately they do not work - complain about UM8672 not being detected. Supposedly they would enable the secondary IDE channel. Perhaps they need the BIOS chip add on on the card judging from README talking about pressing F10 during boot and a BIOS style menu which I do not have. In any case, EZ-BIOS removed the need for such a driver. Thanks everyone for the help! Cheers, Dimitris On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 10:51 PM, TJ Edmister <damag...@hyakushiki.net> wrote: > On Tue, 09 Aug 2016 13:57:35 -0400, Dimitris Zilaskos > <dimitr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > The issue I am facing now is that the mechanical drives I connected to > > the > > secondary IDE channel of my Vesa Local Bus controller are not detected. > > Windows 98 SE bootdisk does not detect them either, The BIOS of my system > > only supports 2 hard drives. > > IIRC, if your motherboard BIOS only supports two drives, you could use a > controller card with its own onboard ROM for additional drives to be > recognized under DOS (or Win9x). Depending on what chipset the card uses, > there might also be a driver which can enable the second channel. > > Not sure if the various DMA DOS drivers would detect and add drives on the > second channel (in fact, I don't know if they work on ISA/VL IDE > controllers or if PCI is required) > > > ------------------------------------------------------------ > ------------------ > What NetFlow Analyzer can do for you? Monitors network bandwidth and > traffic > patterns at an interface-level. Reveals which users, apps, and protocols > are > consuming the most bandwidth. Provides multi-vendor support for NetFlow, > J-Flow, sFlow and other flows. Make informed decisions using capacity > planning reports. http://sdm.link/zohodev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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