I went through my old hard drives and I think I will take the chance since the motherboard isn't that expensive. I have no idea if any of the hard drives will work, but I think there is a decent chance. I found one Fujitsu 2.62Gb hard drive that looks bit beaten up, I found one 40Gb hard drive that has a jumper that will limit the size to 2.1Gb and I found one 80Gb hard drive that has a jumper that will limit size to 32Gb.

Again, if you have any Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, or IBM drives, they can all be set to appear as an arbitrary size drive. My 386 now has a 60 GB Spinpoint IDE drive limited at 1032192 sectors (the 528 MB limit). Either download the Hitachi or Seagate drive tool or download Hiren's (as it has all most of the drive vendor's tools).

gdjacobs wrote:

Again, if you have any Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, or IBM drives, they can all be set to appear as an arbitrary size drive. My 386 now has a 60 GB Spinpoint IDE drive limited at 1032192 sectors (the 528 MB limit). Either download the Hitachi or Seagate drive tool or download Hiren's (as it has all most of the drive vendor's tools).

Sorry about that. I must have missed your previous message.

I wonder if there are such BIOS newer revisions for 486 BIOSes too, as there are for Pentiums?

OR done that without swapping or upgrading the bios firmware?
Thus, to make a some sort of universal patch for such a BIOS with extra ROM with HDD handling routine code or something? (I mean the overdrive soft in hardware).
?

jxalex wrote:

I wonder if there are such BIOS newer revisions for 486 BIOSes too, as there are for Pentiums? […]
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I wonder if there are such BIOS newer revisions for 486 BIOSes too, as there are for Pentiums?

OR done that without swapping or upgrading the bios firmware?
Thus, to make a some sort of universal patch for such a BIOS with extra ROM with HDD handling routine code or something? (I mean the overdrive soft in hardware).
?

We call it XT-IDE 🤣

Baoran wrote:

Sorry about that. I must have missed your previous message.

NP. I had a bad time with hardware mortality scrounging around for period IDE drives for this 386 board; soft limiting drives instead has really saved a lot of grief. I suspect that you'll have a similar experience if you give it a go.

Yep, I use XT-IDE to allow my 486 to use a newer and very much quieter WD hard drive.

I went and got the motherboard today. It almost looks like it is brand new. This is the smallest and cleanest such old motherboard I have ever seen. I hope it will work. and I will see what kind of hard drives it likes.

If I put a 10Gb hard drive in the pc and bios auto detect detects the size as 8Gb, does the hard drive still work as 8Gb hard drive?

That sounds right. Also, I'd suggest using the XT-IDE Universal BIOS on either an Ethernet card with the Boot ROM ((E)EPROM 8KB, 16KB, or 32KB) enabled since that'll allow you to use the HDD as the full storage (make sure you disable the auto detect for MS-DOS unless you want to use Windows 95 or 98/98SE on your machine) over the DDO (Dynamic Disk Overlay) software as that hogs a lot of the conventional memory, and the XT-IDE Universal BIOS only takes 1KB conventional memory out of the 640KB, which is better.

This is what pushed me over to CF to IDE converters. finding < 8GB CF cards is much easier then actual HDD's
but if the currant drive is working fine I would stick with that for now, 8GB is plenty for a 486