HDD replacements if bios locked \ VOGONS

HDD replacements if bios locked

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First post, by squelch41

Posted on 2024-09-24, 18:35

squelch41 Offline

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Hi,

I was looking at a 386 laptop.
It's bios is locked to 20, 40, 60 or 80Mb hard disks - you cant put in custom settings.
It was designed to use small conner hard disks which will have all long since left this world!

Are there any modern solutions that will work in this situation? I presume CF cards require the CHS to match their defined CHS settings?
My usual way round would be xtide but there is no ISA slot

Thanks

V4P895P3 VLB Motherboard AMD 486 133MHz.64mb RAM, CF 4Gb HDD,

440bx MSI 6119, modified slocket , Tualitin Celeron 1.2Ghz 256mb SD-RAM, CF 4GB HDD, FX5200 gfx

386sx 20MHz ICL NB386s laptop, 4mb RAM, modified bios with XT-IDE, CF 512mb, 387 FPU

Reply 1 of 4, by paradigital

Posted on 2024-09-24, 18:42

paradigital Offline

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XTIDE doesn’t necessarily need an ISA slot, just a way to present an option ROM, which may still be possible depending on what expansion there is, or what potential ROM space there is on the board.

Reply 2 of 4, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2024-09-24, 18:57

wbahnassi Offline

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For CF cards, I believe the are flexible. Just grab a tiny size (100MB or 200MB) and set the BIOS at 80MB. FDisk then format and you get 80MB.
If you want a larger size use an overlay.

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Reply 3 of 4, by Zup

Posted on 2024-09-24, 19:01

Zup Offline

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I guess that most HDDs will work (although limited to those values). The rule is that the new disk has to have at least the same cylinders, heads and sectors per track.

I mean, if your disk is defined as 611/4/17, a disk with 1280/4/17 would work but a disk with 2560/2/17 not. Keep in mind that modern disks may not be supported by old controllers, so I'd try to get an HDD or CF card less than 500Mb.

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Reply 4 of 4, by Thermalwrong

Posted on 2024-09-24, 20:30

Thermalwrong Offline

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What type of BIOS is it? I was able to use modbin on an award BIOS I think from 1993 with a 486 laptop, my Quanta HFS-SK4 / Viglen-Dossier-486. Its drive table could only see its fixed set and if it didn't match up it would pick option 45 which was an 81mb drive.
I only learned that last part later when using MSD in DOS 😀

Requires an external programmer to read out and reprogram the BIOS chip
Wish I took more pictures, but using cdrom to extract the BIOS and then modbin from 1997 in dosbox-x I was able to successfully extract the drive table into a text file, edited that with values from ideinfo.exe run from a bootable floppy disk.
Then put the new drive table into the BIOS and put the BIOS back together, reflashed it and it's been working with this compact flash card since:

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