Fziffle wrote on 2025-07-27, 00:35:

I have a PCI 3c905-tx Rev B 10/100 board, and I'm wondering about the ROM - it is a 32 pin socket. I need XT-IDE to add SSD type boot drives as the hard disk is getting some errors (to the point of locking up Spinright 5.0). The biggest complication is that the boot drive is muliboot via partition magic, and has ez-bios on it for drive size, existing bios is the first LBA type. Boot drive is 1.5 GB, but has hidden partitions and such because of partition magic; Not sure if it is safe to remove ez-boot nor not.

Trying to decide if I should forget the existing drive all together (dual boot dos 6.22 and win98) or start over.

My personal preference, for the last 30+ years, has been one OS per physical drive.

I also hate disk overlays with an undying passion.

Personally, I would

a) backup any useful data
b) get XT-IDE working
c) start over

I hate them now, but back when I had this machine back in the day, that was the only way to get larger drives :<. If there was only a Picomem back then...

Or at least info on how to use the ROM socket on my 3C905-TX network card.

The more simple your setup the easier it is to recover.

Even if you remove ez-bios from the setup, you'll still need to create the partition magic side of the setup on the replacement disk. 1 less step sure but still a fair bit of work to install/restore the partitions.

Why do you need dos 6.22 AND Win98? for gaming Dos 7 that sits under Win9x is more then enough. which simplifies things much more.

Full disclosure I'm guilty of overcomplicating things, almost all my builds are dual boot and have 2 computers that use drive overlay. But I also accept rebuilds take twice as long. but then I get enjoyment of starting fresh from time to time as well.