Dynamic Disc Overlay on 286? \ VOGONS

Dynamic Disc Overlay on 286?

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First post, by Alkarion

Posted on 2006-06-30, 20:15

Alkarion Offline

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Today I tried to make my Quantum Fireball (1280MB) work in my old 286. That is - it worked well until I copied too much stuff on it and encountered problems due to the 528 MB limit.

So I thought that maybe Ontrack's Disc Manager may help, but I didn't get to install it because I had only Seagate versions available. Also, I'm not sure that it will work. Does Disc Manager - ie the Dynamic Disk Overlay work on a 286? Any experiences?

I guess I can also buy a disk controller card but that would be less than optimal due to ISA slot usage. Smaller hard disks are increasingly hard to come by so it would be best if it worked with DDO.

Reply 1 of 3, by 5u3

Posted on 2006-07-01, 12:52

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I'm not sure about this - even if DDO worked on your 286, disk access times would be horrible. It even bothered me when I used it on a 486.

One possible method would be to take a bigger disk and partition it to only use about 500MB, but that's a rather awkward workaround.
Another solution would be a IDE / CF card adapter like shown in this thread.

Reply 2 of 3, by Alkarion

Posted on 2006-07-01, 14:47

Alkarion Offline

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Thanks for the tip, but I tried it again with some older version of Ontrack's Disk Manager and it worked. I can see no speed difference, the Quantum Fireball is lightning fast for a 286 anyway. The video card seems to be the main bottleneck now.

I wonder though if there are any games that could cause problems with low-level disc access. Does Win 3.1 also need some kind of new disk driver?

I think repartitioning would not be an option since the problem would still be that the BIOS can only see a part of the drive. Since my BIOS produced random errors on disk acess, I don't think it would be a good idea to try that out.

Reply 3 of 3, by 5u3

Posted on 2006-07-02, 21:58

5u3 Offline

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Glad to hear it works! 😀
About the speed issue: Maybe it was just a problem with my 486 chipset. Before each disk access the whole thing seemed to stop for a second.

Alkarion wrote:
I wonder though if there are any games that could cause problems with low-level disc access. Does Win 3.1 also need some kind of new disk driver?

Anything using DOS calls for disk access should work fine (including Win 3.11 with the standard IDE driver).

Alkarion wrote:
The video card seems to be the main bottleneck now.

*cough* Get an ET4000 *cough* 😀

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