I'm new here, but I ooohhh so remember the days of manually tweaking all my autoexecs and configs for conventional memory.
The best thing I found was to use a program that I don't remember anymore to actually 'look' at all my memory 1mb and below. You could see which regions had a bios in it, which were empty, which were free, which were allocated, but actually had nothing in them.
Then I'd map those regions and figure out how much free space I had in each region. Then I'd take all my drivers and figure out which one should fit where. Then I'd program them in into the autoexec and config and test. If there's a problem, readjust and test again.
It would usually take a whole day to do this, but in the end, I'd have everything I want running, including smartdrive, network drivers, and niceities like doskey. 😀
I know I've still got those carfully configured files still sitting on my old systems. Too bad I haven't booted some of them in a decade now. 🙁