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2GB HDD limit in BIOS - Would XT-IDE fix this?

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First post, by nzgamer41

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Hello all,

I have a Digital Venturis 575 machine that I've been trying to get running but have stumbled into an issue. It doesn't seem to like any of my IDE HDDs on the onboard controller. I've got some older ones that are ~4GB each but the BIOS won't detect them. Playing around a bit it did seem to like a ~2GB drive I had spare, but that's in my 486 machine and I only took it out for testing. Ideally I'd like to use this computer for Windows 95/98 stuff, so I'd like a larger drive anyway.

I just wanted to check before I go out and spend more money, would installing an XT-IDE allow my larger drives to work and be bootable? Or is there a BIOS update/patch/something or rather I can do to get the BIOS to play nice with my larger drives? It's a PhoenixBIOS one, when it boots it says "Venturis 575 version 2.0". As a sanity check I have tried booting to the install disks for Windows 95 and 98, and FDISK on either can't see the drive, and if I manually try setting the type to something around 2.1GB in BIOS (rather then trying the autodetect that fails on anything but my 2GB drive), it fails to POST on Hard Disk error.

If an XT-IDE isn't the right option, I'll just get one of those CF-to-IDE adapters and get a 2GB CF card, but figured worth asking here about it first.

Thanks,
nzgamer41

Reply 1 of 8, by AlexZ

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Get a PCI IDE or SATA card. They handle hard drive BIOS calls. You can have a bootable 120GB hard drive on 486/586.

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Reply 2 of 8, by Jo22

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Or an SCSI HDD/SCSI Controller with BIOS. 🙂

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 3 of 8, by nzgamer41

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AlexZ wrote on 2023-04-23, 07:42:

Get a PCI IDE or SATA card. They handle hard drive BIOS calls. You can have a bootable 120GB hard drive on 486/586.

I did try a generic VIA chipset combo IDE/SATA card I had lying around, it didn't seem to see the IDE drive I hooked up to it but I'm starting to suspect a dodgy IDE cable/dying drive there.

Is there a specific chipset brand I should look for? Or should my VIA one work?

Reply 4 of 8, by douglar

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xtide is a term that covers a couple different things, but yes, xtide universal bios will let you work with large drives. make sure you run the config utility to configure the image you want to use before writing the eprom.

https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/

If you are not comfortable writing eproms, consider buying an Ata-6 controller with a vendor bios extensions that works with your system. just to make sure, let me repeat, you specifically you need to choose one that has bios extensions and you probably want to disable any other controllers in you system.

Reply 5 of 8, by nzgamer41

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douglar wrote on 2023-04-24, 03:28:

xtide is a term that covers a couple different things, but yes, xtide universal bios will let you work with large drives. make sure you run the config utility to configure the image you want to use before writing the eprom.

https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/

If you are not comfortable writing eproms, consider buying an Ata-6 controller with a vendor bios extensions that works with your system. just to make sure, let me repeat, you specifically you need to choose one that has bios extensions and you probably want to disable any other controllers in you system.

Thank you for that, I had meant more the ISA card (EDIT: I mean the 8-bit ISA card that's sold as an "XT-IDE" card like this one: https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/11/23/xt-ide-rev4) however I've had some luck with my generic VIA one, turns out it was a dodgy cable (or just needed reseating) as since swapping the cable out I now see the VIA RAID BIOS screen and the IDE drive can be seen by DOS.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

Reply 6 of 8, by keropi

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All you need is the XT-IDE bios to load somehow in your system (best choice IMHO is an ethernet card where you put xt-ide bios on the bootrom socket)
It will basically replace the "ide portion" of your system bios with "xt-ide portion" - you just have to go to main bios and disable all HDDs and leave xt-ide at the default 1F0 address so it will use your onboard IDE controller.
It works great and it's better than software solutions like disk manager and similar.

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Reply 7 of 8, by Jo22

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And it can boot from the secondary IDE/ATAPI port of a soundcard, too!
That's ideal for people with a vintage system and no on-board IDE or multi-i/o card! 😁

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 8 of 8, by chinny22

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If you want a free option you can also use Dynamic Drive Overlay software.
EZ-Drive Dynamic Drive Overlay
Works well in my 486 but been software results vary from machine to machine. Given the cost (free) I always recommend trying this out first though!

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