Adapt a ide cd drive to sata,

But win me doesn’t like sata cd drives…. But maybe patched ME does?

Hmmm. That mobo is pci and pci express, a pci ide controller may be your next attempt

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-07-07, 04:27:

Adapt a ide cd drive to sata,

But win me doesn’t like sata cd drives…. But maybe patched ME does?

Hmmm. That mobo is pci and pci express, a pci ide controller may be your next attempt

Hmmm... PTCHSATA only addresses issues related to on-chipset SATA ports. It doesn't support off-chipset controllers as these usually need their own drivers.

Since FreeDOS has TSRs that can see the optical drive, maybe I could do some experiments with it, though it'll probably end up forcing MS-DOS compatibility mode globally, not just the drive.

(PS: Windows ME can enter real-mode DOS and use CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT, by using the "unrestricted" IO.SYS and other files from ltools.dta.)

In the end I connected my IDE optical drive to a native SATA port using an IDE-SATA adapter so it can be used out-of-box. It seems to be the only viable way to connect it.

The PATA port is only a part of 88SE6121's function on that motherboard. The two off-chipset "DriveXpert" SATA ports on the motherboard are also powered by 88SE6121, despite ASUS' documentation stating these ports are being driven by SIL5723. When I connected a drive to those ports, it showed up on 88SE6121's option ROM screen and behaved the same way as the PATA port. I'm disabling the option ROM for 88SE6121 as the drive I'm connecting to it is to be used as a data drive that will only be accessed by OSes that have drivers for it.

Have you tried rloew's TBPLUS package?

https://rloewelectronics.com/distribute/TBPLUS/3.0/PATCH/

It has both a windows and DOS component to it, and the DOS portion might help for your case?

Duffman wrote on 2023-07-22, 17:16:

Have you tried rloew's TBPLUS package?

https://rloewelectronics.com/distribute/TBPLUS/3.0/PATCH/

It has both a windows and DOS component to it, and the DOS portion might help for your case?

Interesting. Looks like TBPLUS has more stuffs than I thought. However it seems to be more about Win98SE. Only the DISKTSD file is the WinME version, according to the manual.

But in the end, if you want out-of-box legacy functionality you're limited to the ports directly provided by the chipset. It's very trivial to adapt an PATA drive (be it hard disk or optical) to SATA nowadays so an actual, off-chipset PATA connector is not going to be as useful as it was back then. A good quality adapter is all you need.

EDIT: And I uncovered another problem -- Old DOS CD drivers assume only four disk controller ports. I placed my CD on the 6th SATA port and the drivers failed to detect it. Using UDVD2 from FreeDOS, however, works. In any case, with the disk driver properly patched for SATA support using rloew's patch, the CD drive on the 6th SATA port works out-of-box.