Adaptec PowerIDE! Its free

Babasha wrote on 2026-01-25, 14:14:

Adaptec PowerIDE! Its free

https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid= … 028&menustate=0 <-- this?

KenjiUmino wrote on 2026-01-25, 15:23:

Babasha wrote on 2026-01-25, 14:14:

Adaptec PowerIDE! Its free

https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid= … 028&menustate=0 <-- this?

Yes

Babasha wrote on 2026-01-25, 15:32:

Adaptec PowerIDE! Its free

Interesting. Does it work as just an enabler, or does it have a resident part?

There's an oldschool DOS util on simtel archives and similar places which is called 4drives or 3drives (demo version only lets you add one extra). I was using that back in the day to access a 3rd HDD on a soundcard IDE, but I don't recall much about setup.

Babasha wrote on 2026-01-25, 15:32:

KenjiUmino wrote on 2026-01-25, 15:23:

Babasha wrote on 2026-01-25, 14:14:

Adaptec PowerIDE! Its free

https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid= … 028&menustate=0 <-- this?

Yes

Thanks a bunch. I downloaded it and played around with it all day - still not fully working but I think I am most of the way there.

BTW, what's going on with vogondsrivers right now? The servers seem to have severe bandwidth issues or something.
Downloading this 558k file took over 30 minutes and failed at least three times throughout the download.
Luckily, Firefox has a "resume/retry" button and continues downloading where it failed instead of doing the whole file over again.

Once the file was downloaded successfully, I extracted it, put it on a floppy and ran the setup.exe from within windows as suggested in the readme.

First thing I found out was that PWRIDE creates entries in the config.sys during installation but nothing in the autoexec.bat.
This didn't help because the config.sys stuff gets loaded BEFORE the autoexec.bat, so PWRIDE could not find the additional IDE channel because Unisound had not loaded and initialized the sound card yet.

I then REMed out the PWRIDE lines in the config.sys and used LOADSYS instead to manually load the two PWRIDE files after Unisound had done its job. (I wrote a little batch file for that)
That got PWRIDE tho detect the additional IDE channel but not the connected drive.
I found out that the connected drive would only show up if the soundcards IDE is initialized as "tertiary" IDE channel (1E8h/IRQ11) - the unisound readme mentions that some soundcards only work at a certain address and IRQ, so this card is probably one of them.

Now I got PWRIDE to detect the IDE controller as well as any drive connected to it - I can even go into fdisk and create partitions, PWDIAG sees the drive and can run tests, CHECKIT sees the drive and can run its tests ... but I still don't get a drive letter so I can't format the newly created partition.
I took the SD card out, put it into my laptop and used gparted to format it to "FAT16" but that did not change anything once the card was back in the old PC.

As you can see on the screenshot, the last message from PWRIDE is "Install as drive A:" but when I type A: at the prompt, the floppy drive starts making noise as expected and DOS complains if there is no disk in the drive.

I tried B: too but then DOS tries to hit a floppy drive that isn't even there and errors out ... E:, F:, G:, etc are also not valid.

What am I missing?

KenjiUmino wrote on 2026-01-26, 20:10:

As you can see on the screenshot, the last message from PWRIDE is "Install as drive A:" but when I type A: at the prompt, the floppy drive starts making noise as expected and DOS complains if there is no disk in the drive.

Maybe try disabling the real drive A: in CMOS/BIOS settings and see if the PWRIDE drive becomes available?

KenjiUmino wrote on 2026-01-26, 20:10:

Thanks a bunch. I downloaded it and played around with it all day - still not fully working but I think I am most of the way the […]
Show full quote

Babasha wrote on 2026-01-25, 15:32:

KenjiUmino wrote on 2026-01-25, 15:23:

https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid= … 028&menustate=0 <-- this?

Yes

Thanks a bunch. I downloaded it and played around with it all day - still not fully working but I think I am most of the way there.

BTW, what's going on with vogondsrivers right now? The servers seem to have severe bandwidth issues or something.
Downloading this 558k file took over 30 minutes and failed at least three times throughout the download.
Luckily, Firefox has a "resume/retry" button and continues downloading where it failed instead of doing the whole file over again.

Once the file was downloaded successfully, I extracted it, put it on a floppy and ran the setup.exe from within windows as suggested in the readme.

First thing I found out was that PWRIDE creates entries in the config.sys during installation but nothing in the autoexec.bat.
This didn't help because the config.sys stuff gets loaded BEFORE the autoexec.bat, so PWRIDE could not find the additional IDE channel because Unisound had not loaded and initialized the sound card yet.

I then REMed out the PWRIDE lines in the config.sys and used LOADSYS instead to manually load the two PWRIDE files after Unisound had done its job. (I wrote a little batch file for that)
That got PWRIDE tho detect the additional IDE channel but not the connected drive.
I found out that the connected drive would only show up if the soundcards IDE is initialized as "tertiary" IDE channel (1E8h/IRQ11) - the unisound readme mentions that some soundcards only work at a certain address and IRQ, so this card is probably one of them.

Now I got PWRIDE to detect the IDE controller as well as any drive connected to it - I can even go into fdisk and create partitions, PWDIAG sees the drive and can run tests, CHECKIT sees the drive and can run its tests ... but I still don't get a drive letter so I can't format the newly created partition.
I took the SD card out, put it into my laptop and used gparted to format it to "FAT16" but that did not change anything once the card was back in the old PC.

As you can see on the screenshot, the last message from PWRIDE is "Install as drive A:" but when I type A: at the prompt, the floppy drive starts making noise as expected and DOS complains if there is no disk in the drive.

I tried B: too but then DOS tries to hit a floppy drive that isn't even there and errors out ... E:, F:, G:, etc are also not valid.

What am I missing?

Are there BIOS Plug and Play (PnP) or Plug & Play O/S, Plug and Play Aware O/S, PNP OS Installed options in BIOS of your computer? How is it set up?

Doesn't Unisound can be loaded via the INSTALL directive at config.sys?
I also remember it supports the DEVICE directive. Or I maybe confusing it with another TSR programmed by people here.

As for the PWRIDE, you are missing device configuration parameter switches. Refer to the documentation how it actually works. I very doubt it would do an automatic configuration giving your special setup.

EDIT: How about using Grub4DOS to buckle the initialization with UNISOUND? You can make an special dos boot floppy with only UNISOUND and the DOS version of grub4dos. Then you use UNISOUND to initialize the card, and then load XTIDE with Grub4DOS to boot DOS from the HDD.
That's how we did in the old days of linux when only PnP initializers or PCMCIA storage drivers were available for DOS only.

what about simply not using unisound and tracking down the OEM sound card drivers?

maxtherabbit wrote on 2026-01-27, 17:23:

what about simply not using unisound and tracking down the OEM sound card drivers?

Only a few sound cards support Fixed Disks at their extra ports. Mostly SCSI.
The remaining, mostly cheap cards, only support CDROMs. Not even ZIPs, Floptical or other kind of IDE storage.
That's why XTIDE supports initialization at these specific cases, but only on jumper configured cards, as it doesn't offer an ISAPnP enabler.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2026-01-27, 17:29:

Only a few sound cards support Fixed Disks at their extra ports. Mostly SCSI. The remaining, mostly cheap cards, only support CD […]
Show full quote

maxtherabbit wrote on 2026-01-27, 17:23:

what about simply not using unisound and tracking down the OEM sound card drivers?

Only a few sound cards support Fixed Disks at their extra ports. Mostly SCSI.
The remaining, mostly cheap cards, only support CDROMs. Not even ZIPs, Floptical or other kind of IDE storage.
That's why XTIDE supports initialization at these specific cases, but only on jumper configured cards, as it doesn't offer an ISAPnP enabler.

Ok but that has no bearing on my comment. Using unisound wouldn't change anything relative to what can or cannot be done with the sound cards ATA interface.

My point was that if the power ide driver needs to be loaded after the sound card is initialized than an easy way to do that would be to use the OEM driver, if it loads as an installable device driver in config.sys.

Fyi anything loaded in config.sys with the INSTALL directive is loaded after all DEVICE directives, regardless of its position in the config file.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2026-01-27, 17:29:

Only a few sound cards support Fixed Disks at their extra ports. Mostly SCSI.
The remaining, mostly cheap cards, only support CDROMs. Not even ZIPs, Floptical or other kind of IDE storage.

This simply isn't true. IDE doesn't really have any circuitry besides a buffer, it connects directly to the ISA bus. So there's no logical reason a card would support one type of drive over another.

jmarsh wrote on 2026-01-27, 18:49:

hyoenmadan wrote on 2026-01-27, 17:29:

Only a few sound cards support Fixed Disks at their extra ports. Mostly SCSI.
The remaining, mostly cheap cards, only support CDROMs. Not even ZIPs, Floptical or other kind of IDE storage.

This simply isn't true. IDE doesn't really have any circuitry besides a buffer, it connects directly to the ISA bus. So there's no logical reason a card would support one type of drive over another.

Yes with the exception that your Zip or floptical driver drivers might not look as far as IRQ 11 or 12, or other i/o addresses but everything should work when soundcard is set up to IRQ15 and standard secondary IDE addresses. Sure, you are not going to boot off the CDROM, Zip, floptical or LS120 that is hooked up like this, but in the era of BIOS only having HDD support for primary IDE, it's probably not going to boot on the primary channel either. If you had secondary IDE support in BIOS and card defaulted to irq 15 etc, then you would probably see BIOS supported drives on it.

Sadly, most SB16s with ide cdrom controllers used irq 10, and the tertiary address, and did not want to be moved.

a few early ones with jumpers might permit them being secondary IDE, but not the jumperless ones, iirc.

(I had a cdrom, and a 'mass storage clunker hdd' attached to mine, with the hard disk only showing up in windows.)

jmarsh wrote on 2026-01-27, 18:49:

This simply isn't true. IDE doesn't really have any circuitry besides a buffer, it connects directly to the ISA bus. So there's no logical reason a card would support one type of drive over another...

I mean they didn't support this kind of configuration at software level, despite the card supporting it electrically or not. A.k.a. they didn't made drivers for it. Sound Card drivers to enable IDE fixed, floptical or zip disks on DOS don't exist. Only CDROM drivers. Thus why PowerIDE was suggested by @Babasha in the first place.
In response about finding specific OEM drivers to make the fixed disk appear and mount in DOS.
I hope it is clear now.

That's backwards.
CD drives required drivers to talk to MSCDEX which was the "standard" interface for programs to access CDs under DOS. Accessing fixed disks was already built into DOS via BIOS routines.

The obstacle, as I understand it, is that DOS is hopelessly dependent on the drive table supplied by the bios.

If the bios does not scan tertiary or quaternary IDE controller addresses, query any drives found there, and add these to the drive table, DOS has no idea they even exist.

The controller(s) its/themselves may well be fully configured and functional. If the bios does not scan them and set up the drive table, stock DOS wont see them.

(XTIDE universal bios can scan all 4 controllers, if present, and populate the int13 drive table correctly, and as such if it is present DOS will see all those drives without any additional help.)

CDRom ATAPI drivers probe the IO addresses for all four possible IDE controllers, and set up any/all drives they find with their driver, which MSCDEX then uses to fetch packets, and then presents to DOS as an installable filesystem. This is how DOS gets made aware of them.

Normally, on boot, DOS queries the drive table, attempts to read the partition tables of every drive listed there, determine if there are any FAT formatted partitions, then enumerates them based on some logic.

Once DOS is already running, simply prodding the drive table wont be enough, the drive must also get enumerated. That's where poweride comes in. It can do both tasks.

32bit disk access in windows means the DOS int13 interface gets depreciated, and so windows does its OWN disk detection and enumeration.

BITD, I did not have money to buy poweride. Instead, the hdd I slappped on my SB AWE32 was 'windows only', but I was glad to have it available.

I used it to warehouse .iso files for daemon tools. The interface was 'fast enough' for cdrom accesses, and this was just virtual cdrom function.

hyoenmadan wrote on 2026-01-30, 05:34:

In response about finding specific OEM drivers to make the fixed disk appear and mount in DOS.
I hope it is clear now.

Except my comment was never about this. It was about finding OEM drivers to initialize the sound card via an installable device driver which can be loaded prior to power IDE