First post, by p6889k
As I'm learning about the various limitations of motherboard's BIOS to support HDDs of certain size, I often see the advice of: "use IDE controller with its own bios", "use network card with its own bios and load XT-IDE on it", "use IDE controller with XT-IDE".
I'm not sure I understand this fully and would appreciate some feedback to my questions:
1) I see one can purchase XT-IDE ISA controller card with IDE 40pin connector. I assume this is just like a SCSI controller in the aspect that it takes control over IDE devices connected to it. Now, lets say I have a 386 motherboard whose BIOS doesn't have any boot settings where I can pick SCSI. Would I just configure the motherboard bios with no HDD and then when the computer boots the XT-IDE would have its own configuration in which I would configure the attached devices and their boot priority?
2) How does one load XT-IDE bios onto network card? How do I know if network card has a bios? Is there a specific model I should be looking for?
3) Do I need any drivers for Windows (3.11, 9x, etc) with any of these XT-IDE devices, just like I would if I was using SCSI controller?
4) Besides XT-IDE, are there any other ISA or PCI IDE controllers that have their own BIOS? How can I tell which controller card does and which doesn't have it? Are there any common models I should look for on eBay or perhaps even new models?
Thank you.
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