On Fri, 12 Mar 2021 at 20:56, Jon Brase <jon.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > > As far as I can tell, OnTrack partitions the disk as part of installing its > translation scheme.
Yup, I think so. Haven't used it this century, TBH. > 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). Augh! :-( This does sound nasty. I had a quick look around for PCI (as in, _not_ PCI-e) SATA controllers. There seem to be plenty around the $15-$25 mark. Whether that would be affordable and worthwhile for you, only you can judge. I found a tiny handful of ones that explicitly say that they have a BIOS but they tend to be a lot more expensive. It's the sort of thing you _might_ pick up super-cheap on eBay or something. > 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: Aha! I used to have one of its kin, an AST Premmia. It was a dual Pentium 100 box; I ran NT 4 Server on it, running an external RAID in a huge SCSI-2 cabinet containing 7 * full-height 5.25" SCSI hard disks + 4 CD-ROMs. It was a very cheap server, and very robust for many years. > 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. Caveat: you might find that it only has enough tag RAM in its L2 cache to cache 64MB of RAM. This was quite common in early Pentium boxes. Finding tag RAM these days is... unlikely, I suspect. In my testing, adding more RAM past 64MB actually slowed down machines without enough tag RAM. N.B. tag RAM is not the same as cache RAM; it's part of what controls the cache. Upgrading the cache (e.g. with a COAST -- cache-on-a-stick -- module) normally did _not_ upgrade the tag RAM. > 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. > 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. Well, there are PCI SATA controllers with an IDE channel too... https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-RC-212-Controller-Supports-non-RAID/ https://www.amazon.com/VT6421A-3-Port-SATA-Raid-Controller/dp/B000YMJ6ZE/ I have also read that some SATA-EIDE converters work in both directions, sometimes set with a jumper. So maybe you could use the one you already have, IIUIC, to attach a PATA optical drive to a SATA port... :-/ -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
