You can't. It is a dedicated port for a Panasonic CD drive.

Thank you for your quick reply.

Looks like ESS1868 Sound card will do the job. Just have to master the " SUBST" command.

Rich ard wrote on 2023-04-29, 06:14:

Thank you for your quick reply.

Looks like ESS1868 Sound card will do the job. Just have to master the " SUBST" command.

Physically, an ES1868 is perfectly able to interface a hard drive. At the same speed as a standard ISA multi I/O card. If you want to use the hard drive in DOS, though, you either need to have access to that drive using the BIOS, or you need to load an IDE hard disk device driver from CONFIG.SYS (I'm not even aware if one exists).

The standard BIOS of 286, 386 and early 486 boards only interfaces with hard drives connected to the primary controller, whereas most sound cards can not be configured to operate as primary controller. Furthermore, the ES1868 is a PnP card as far as I know, and PnP cards don't do anything until a modern PnP BIOS or a dedicated configuration program configured the I/O address, IRQ channels and DMA channels the card is meant to use.

Possibly some or even all ES1868 cards support an EEPROM-backed non-PnP configuration mode (ESS experts, please chime in here...). If your BIOS supports a secondary IDE channel and you can configure the sound card to use IO 170, IRQ 15 for the IDE interface, BIOS support is possible. This also might apply if your BIOS supports ISA PnP (that started around 1995), and auto-configures the card to those resources.

The last resort if you don't get main board BIOS support is to use a dedicated IDE BIOS extension like the open-source XT-IDE BIOS.

The SUBST command in DOS is not helpful unless DOS already recognized the partitions of that drive. It just rearranges how the partitions are accessed, it does not open up access to new partitions.

If you just want to access your IDE drive from a non-DOS PnP capable operating system (Linux, Windows 2000, Windows 95) that doesn't rely on the BIOS, connecting a hard drive to an ES1868-based sound card will work out-of-the-box.

Thank you for all that info, that certainly answers a lot of possible ways to go. I will let you know if I have any success. My system is 486dx2 ISA VLB Dos 6.2 Windows 3.1

Rich ard wrote on 2023-04-29, 09:05:

My system is 486dx2 ISA VLB Dos 6.2 Windows 3.1

VL board very likely means you don't have ISA PnP support in the BIOS. You likely can only enter two hard drives in the BIOS, and those both habe to be connected to the same IDE interface called configured as "primary". One drive will be configured as "master", the other one as "slave". Most sound cards do not support being the primary IDE interface, only I/O controller cards do. If you are using fast hard drives, a VLB IDE interface can make sense in that system. Their are VLB interface cards that provide two "channels" (primary and secondary), for two devices each, and provide their own BIOS. If you can get a card like that, it will be the easiest option to run a hard drive that is not connected to the primary IDE interface.

This begs the question: Why do you want to connect a hard drive to a secondary IDE interface, for example on a sound card? Do you want to run three hard drives? Are you afraid of performance degradation when you connect two drives to the primary interface?

In a recent thread on VOGONs about using an MFM AT controller and an IDE interface card at the same time, some people mentioned a "four drive" driver. A driver like that may also work for a secondary IDE interface provided by a sound card.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-04-29, 10:51:

In a recent thread on VOGONs about using an MFM AT controller and an IDE interface card at the same time, some people mentioned a "four drive" driver. A driver like that may also work for a secondary IDE interface provided by a sound card.

https://oldcomputer.info/hacks/4hdd/index.htm

This begs the question: Why do you want to connect a hard drive to a secondary IDE interface, for example on a sound card? Do you want to run three hard drives? Are you afraid of performance degradation when you connect two drives to the primary interface?

Its a good question. I always seem to end up doing things the hard way. One benefit is I leaarn a lot along the way. Remembering it is another thing.

A few months back one of my important computers Win98 died containing important data. It took me a while to fix it and I managed to get all my data back.
I needed to get another old PC for backup and a friend of mine offered me his 486dx ISA VLB computer as long as I gave him his Hard drive back.
The 486dx was in a terrible state due to the backup battery had leaked and removed many copper tracks. Took me several months to fix it.

I thought it wise to make a copy of my friends hard drive as it had all the Drivers which I am sure would be hard to find being so old.

The hard drive in question was very small 341MB so I decided to add the "ISA USB PCB board". It seemed to work well but when I tried to copy my friends hard drive
it would stop and display "Unable to create file" this looked as if this is never going to work.

My next thought was to add a second Disk drive and transfer the important files to it. This is where I am at currently.

Jo22 Your link "WEB SITE BLOCKED DUE TO TROJAN"

Rich ard wrote on 2023-04-30, 01:07:

My next thought was to add a second Disk drive and transfer the important files to it. This is where I am at currently.

In that case, find out how to configure the second disk to be a "slave drive", and just connect it to the same cable as the first disk. The hard drive cable should have three connectors, one is for the controller, and the other two for disk drives. The disk drive you already have is acting as "master drive", and permits a second drive to be added. You can then enter that second drive as "D:" in the standard BIOS setup (maybe your board also has IDE HDD auto detect, which you can use instead of manually entering the parameters).

To find out how your drive is configured as "slave drive", you likely get good results when searching the internet for the model number of that second drive together with "jumpers" or "jumper settings".

Rich ard wrote on 2023-04-30, 01:07:

Jo22 Your link "WEB SITE BLOCKED DUE TO TROJAN"

Sorry to hear. It's not blocked here, though. Your ISP might be a bit paranoid, not sure. 🤷‍♂️
Anyway, screenshot and utility attached.

Edit: To later readers who may read this: The driver works.
I've used it for a while on a 286-16 PC with an ESS688F sound card that has an IDE/ATAPI port.
Attached was a CF card via mechanical adapter (slot mounted).

The driver uses the drive geometry of the first drive configured in CMOS Setup,
and applies it to the CF card / HDD on the secondary master port of the sound card.
That way, DOS sees two identical drives. So you use two similar CF cards, at best.

One as primary master (C:) on the motherboard (or multi-I/o card)
and one as secondary master (D:) on sound card.
I've used this for the purpose of file transfer.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-04-30, 06:44:

Rich ard wrote on 2023-04-30, 01:07:

My next thought was to add a second Disk drive and transfer the important files to it. This is where I am at currently.

In that case, find out how to configure the second disk to be a "slave drive", and just connect it to the same cable as the first disk. The hard drive cable should have three connectors, one is for the controller, and the other two for disk drives. The disk drive you already have is acting as "master drive", and permits a second drive to be added. You can then enter that second drive as "D:" in the standard BIOS setup (maybe your board also has IDE HDD auto detect, which you can use instead of manually entering the parameters).

To find out how your drive is configured as "slave drive", you likely get good results when searching the internet for the model number of that second drive together with "jumpers" or "jumper settings".

Never thought of doing that. The 16bit IAS controller card is currently controlling C: and Floppy drive A: Sounds feasible that this would work as the 16 bit ISA card is doing the same thing as a motherboard.
Will try this in the morning and let you know how it goes. Thank you for your help. Soon be 9 PM here time for shower.

Forgot that the CDROM also connected to the ISA controller card. Don't need the the CDROM for file transfer so disconnected it and now have access to original hard drive C: and Slave drive F:
Thank you mkarcher for your help getting me this far. Unfortunately I only have 3.147.776 bytes free on this drive so I am going to have to shift something of this F: drive.

How will i recognise all the ISA Card Drivers? Will they be all together under a folder? I see a few *.DRV files in Windoows \system folder.

Probably best thing to do is copy the whole drive C: on a clean drive and then delete the stuff I don't need. I will give it some more thought.

Rich ard wrote on 2023-05-01, 05:50:

Forgot that the CDROM also connected to the ISA controller card. Don't need the the CDROM for file transfer so disconnected it and now have access to original hard drive C: and Slave drive F:

In case you need two drives and a CDROM (maybe in a different project): Connect the hard drives to the primary controller card (the ISA card in your case). They will be supported by the BIOS. Connect the CDROM to any kind of ISA IDE interface (for example on a sound card). The IDE CDROM driver detect CD-ROM drives on any ISA IDE interface, not just the primary one.

Rich ard wrote on 2023-05-01, 05:50:

Thank you mkarcher for your help getting me this far. Unfortunately I only have 3.147.776 bytes free on this drive so I am going to have to shift something of this F: drive.

How will i recognise all the ISA Card Drivers? Will they be all together under a folder? I see a few *.DRV files in Windoows \system folder.

There is no standard location for DOS and Windows 3.1 drivers. The DRV files themselves without the matching installation program or .INF files are not enough to install them on a new computer, unless you like manually editing system configuration files without sufficient documentation. Backing up the whole drive is the best idea, indeed.

You might be able to connect the 486DX drive you want to back up to your newer Windows '98 computer and make an image using a program like Ghost. If that Windows '98 computer has a CD writer, you can write that image to a CD-R, so you don't use any valuable hard disk space for that backup.

I am going to study up on the Ghost program and how to make an image as it's something many people talk about. That should keep me busy for week or two.
Will let you no how things turn out then. Thanks again for helping out.