The 528 MB limit is about the drive, not about partitions - creating more partions can't help here.
With a typical 386 BIOS, the solutions are:
- software like Ontrack Disk Manager
- some drives (eg. Seagate ST-5850A) have a "dual-drive emulation" jumper, ie. they act as both Master and Slave, each smaller than 528 MB

if you just don't have correct size of hard drive you can also set the amount of cylinders to max allowed and use the hard drive as 528MB drive. I have a hard drive that was only like 20MB larger than the max allowed and it works like that.

BTW, I just had a look at Ontrack Disk Manager - it comes with "ontrackw.386", a VxD for Windows 3.1 which is supposed to support the 32-bit disk-access feature.

Grzyb wrote on 2020-09-26, 16:43:

The 528 MB limit is about the drive, not about partitions - creating more partions can't help here. With a typical 386 BIOS, the […]
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The 528 MB limit is about the drive, not about partitions - creating more partions can't help here.
With a typical 386 BIOS, the solutions are:
- software like Ontrack Disk Manager
- some drives (eg. Seagate ST-5850A) have a "dual-drive emulation" jumper, ie. they act as both Master and Slave, each smaller than 528 MB

What does dual drive emulation modus do? Is it just to set the cyl lower so the drive have less capacity so it would detect by the bios.

Or is this more that it works in dual mode.. So one part would be like 528, and de second part the rest of the capacity of the drive.

Also i dont get why more capacity of the drive (over 528MB) will end up on 32bit disk access on windows 3.1

Grzyb wrote on 2020-09-26, 18:03:

BTW, I just had a look at Ontrack Disk Manager - it comes with "ontrackw.386", a VxD for Windows 3.1 which is supposed to support the 32-bit disk-access feature.

Which version of ontrack?

Robin4 wrote on 2020-09-26, 18:22:

Grzyb wrote on 2020-09-26, 18:03:

BTW, I just had a look at Ontrack Disk Manager - it comes with "ontrackw.386", a VxD for Windows 3.1 which is supposed to support the 32-bit disk-access feature.

Which version of ontrack?

At this moment I have version 9.43, IBM OEM.
Safe bet that VxD is provided with many other versions as well.

As for the dual drive emulation...
The example ST-5850A is normally 1656 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sectors = 854,654,976 Bytes.
With dual drive emulation, it appears as two drives:
827 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sectors = 426,811,392 (Master)
827 cyl, 16 heads, 63 sectors = 426,811,392 (Slave)

Dual drive setting works great for drives that support it. The limitation here is you can't use a second drive on your IDE channel.
This is because the drive itself literally reports itself being two separate drives, one master and one slave.
Installing a CDROM or another drive on the same IDE will end up in a conflict, maybe rendering out both drivers until you correct it.
For CDROM or any other drive there's always a sound card with atapi support.

Too get bigger drives, you could look into the SCSI stuff... if you're interested in another rabbit hole. Adaptec controllers have their own bios, support larger drives and are bootable.

Also there is XT IDE to give you large drive compatibility.

Then there was Windows support, I'm not sure about that one.

If your 500+MB drive is mostly for storage you could look into buying a few compactflash cards and an IDE adapter. Much convenient, very pleasure 😀 and reliable. And easy to get files from/to modern computers.

waterbeesje wrote on 2020-09-26, 19:49:

Also there is XT IDE to give you large drive compatibility.

Then there was Windows support, I'm not sure about that one.

Hi, good evening, the MicroHouse driver provides 32-BDA/FastDisk functionality with generic HDDs and also should work just fine with XTIDE Universal BIOS (XUB).

I'm currently using the driver in an x86 set-top box with WfW 3.11 and a 8GB Compact Flash card, by the way. With a patched AMI BIOS..
You can find a copy here : http://win31.de/edrivers.htm

That being said, it's not necessary if you're using a DDO that has Windows support already.

I run 120Gb 2,5" Disk with XTIDE inside my 386 Machine.
XTIDE BIOS is on 3Com ISA Lan Card on a 27C64 ROM.

It works fine, except for some Bugs.
Somehow i can not boot partitions after 8Gb boundary.

But i store a load of cd-images for use with msdos cd emulator 😀

I can tell you that 32-bit disk access is not supposed to be a significant speed booster. 32-bit file access, however, is a significant improvement so that should always be on. Ontrack 7.02, IBM edition, definitely does include a 32-bit driver for disk access. I've used it, it worked on my computer.

I've never used it, but I did just pick up a pair of ISA E-IDE controllers with BIOS chips onboard. Pretty sure the main point was to allow a 386 or older 486 to use larger hard disks without overlay software or a system BIOS upgrade, because these more being sold in the Pentium era as upgrade/replacement parts.

matze79 wrote on 2020-09-29, 20:35:

I run 120Gb 2,5" Disk with XTIDE inside my 386 Machine.
[...]
Somehow i can not boot partitions after 8Gb boundary.

You mean XTIDE Universal BIOS, right?
Does it support INT 13h extensions to provide access to more than 8 GB?
If so, which version?
And what OS you use on than 386?

I just chuck any IDE, PATA drive, and set up bios to use 528MB for DOS if motherboard only supports that. If Pentium board, I'd still do that with any large hard drive and set it as 2, 4, 6 or 8GB and partition them at 2GB each if I'm using DOS only machine.

But if I have a special fondness for a PC like 386DX, I'd certainly find older hard drive but that is expensive which I did.

Cheers,

You already have the 800MB drive right?

Honestly I'd just go down the On-track option. it's easy, free and invisible to the OS.
https://youtu.be/sI7U9LYbt28
Only thing I haven't done is try to enable 32bit access in Win3.11, I spend so little time in Windows I don't usually bother messing round with that.

After you have set that up you can decide if its good enough or you would prefer to invest money in hardware options like XTIDE

To add the large hard drive support to your PC, there are few options, each are chewing a bit of conventional memory:
XTIDE - you'll lose about 1kB conv. memory
EzDrive - Lose about 5kB
OnTrack - Lose about 10kB

So pick your poison. 😀

Not exactly the main toppic but does someone know larger IDE harddrives to 8GB via jumpers on the drive.
I know that there are some ide-drives that can be limited to 32GB but I do not know any drive to be limited to 8GB via jumpers on the drive.

Thx
Doc