On 3/11/21 4:37 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Also, IIUC, you are trying to access _existing_ partitions? No, I do
not think a disk manager will help you there. Disk managers bypass the
BIOS restrictions by remapping or translating disks' real values, but
they do not just fix the problem. Once you have a disk manager
installed, I think you will need to create _new_ partitions after
getting a DiskMgr working, using whatever translated scheme it
creates.
As far as I can tell, OnTrack partitions the disk as part of installing
its translation scheme.
So I have an existing disk, and took an image of each partition on it
with partimage(1).
I got my new SSD+adapter, partitioned it (with blank partitions),
blasted the
partition images to the new partitions, and expanded the filesystems to
fill the
partitions. And then ran into trouble with no more than the first 130 MB
of the SSD
showing up when booted in this machine (it's fine in another IDE machine
that's
~5 years newer, which is the machine I used to do the imaging). Really,
at least Linux
*should* have been booting at that point, because kernel versions as
recent as what
I'm using are *supposed* to ignore the information that comes from the
BIOS on drive
sizes. So I beat my head against the wall trying to get that working,
gave up, and decided
to nuke everything to the ground and start over with OnTrack. Then it
turned out that
even OnTrack doesn't see more than the first 130 MB of the disk, which
makes me really
suspect that more than just BIOS is involved (as the entire point of
OnTrack is to work
around BIOS limitations). As I said before, I suspect what's happening
is that the adapter
is detecting something that the BIOS is doing while trying to figure out
the capacity of the
disk, and "helpfully" setting up an HPA on the drive (and doing so so
aggressively that all
but a thousandth of the capacity of the disk is lost).
However, saying all that:
I do not see any info about what the host machine is.
The case is marked as an AST Bravo MS P/75. The information I can find
on that online suggests it has one of the following two mainboards:
A)
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AST-RESEARCH-INC-Pentium-BRAVO-MS-P-75-221478-F01.html
B)
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AST-RESEARCH-INC-Pentium-BRAVO-MS-P75-202759-111-2.html
However, the actual layout of the board in the case is more like this
(given as Bravo MS/MS-T/MS-L):
C)
https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/A/AST-RESEARCH-INC-Pentium-BRAVO-MS-MS-T-MS-L-PENTIU.html
C), interestingly, is not supposed to run at 75 MHz (that page shows
jumper settings for 60, 66, 90, and 100 MHz), but software running on
the physical board (not the blueprint :-) ) detects the CPU as running
at 75 MHz.
The machine has 40 MiB of RAM installed. I notice that all three boards
show a maximum capacity of 128 MiB of RAM. If I could ever find
compatible RAM, that's a tempting option.
It has a riser with 2 ISA slots and a PCI slot on the left side, and an
ISA and a PCI on the right. The ISA slots on the left side are occupied
with an ethernet card and a soundblaster. The PCI slot on the left looks
like it may be fouled by the ethernet card, there's not a lot of space
between it and the ISA slot above, and I'm not sure if I could actually
fit a card into that slot without it coming into contact with the
ethernet card. The slots on the right side are free.
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.
Unless I buy an entirely new optical drive, that will at least stay on
IDE, as all the SATA optical drives in the house are in use by other
computers. OTOH, the prospect of actually being able to boot the thing
directly from optical is enticing.
_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
