a promise ATA 66/100/133 PCI card will solve your woes

Nipedley wrote:

My head said 'Why don't you install Win95 on a single 8GB partition, then make another partition for the other files' This also worked great, and I have my IBM Aptiva back up and running, with Windows natively accessing the whole drive and being able to read that drive in another machine. Unfortunately, when I booted into MS-DOS mode, I can only access the first 8GB again.

This is not clear. You made a second partition which you can read in Windows 95, but not in MS-DOS mode?

Yes, I made an 8GB partition for Windows (as that is all my BIOS can address) and a 32GB partition for the rest. Once in Windows 95 I can access that 32GB partition no problem, but when I boot into DOS mode I can only access the 8GB partition. I can directory list the 32GB partition but cannot access any files, I get an 'Error reading drive D' error.

This is all fixed if I use a DDO, but then I can't access the drive on any other machine to copy files over. That's my issue

@candle_86, you're totally right. I have an ATA133 card in my Pentium 3 and would love to use one here, unfortunately I only have 2 PCI slots and they're both in use for greater things 🙁 1 more PCI slot would have been a godsend. I've got 5 ISA though!

Have you tried XT-IDE universial BIOS? It seems to be an interesting solution and I might give it a try on my 386 system.

Uhm, that's tricky. Is there any chance that you can still update the BIOS to a newer version ?
If not, you could try to track down one of these BIOS enhancer cards for the ISA slot.
They were sold in the late 90s, some of them also had a newer CMOS clock installed to circumvent the Year2000 bug.
No idea if they do work nicely with modern IDE controller using PCI bus mastering,
or if they where meant for classic 486 machines with ISA/VLB controllers.

Alternatively, you could also try the AT version of the XT-IDE BIOS.
I already did a few tests with it, but couldn't get it to work with other OSes except for DOS.

Maybe XT-IDE works if you are running Win95 in compatibility mode (so it is using DOS, like Win 3.x did) ?
As far as i recall, it could run in some sort of "compatibility mode" whenever real-mode drivers where loaded.

Here's a sample picture of one of these enhancer cards:

Source: https://cervete.wordpress.com/for-sale/obsole … computer-items/

Edit: Hi, lazibayer! Seems you already had that IDEa while I was still typing my post! ^^

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-ISA-Controller-Ca … e4AAOSwo3pWeEXN

Found this, dunno if there is an updated bios to support a large drive however

Nipedley wrote:

Yes, I made an 8GB partition for Windows (as that is all my BIOS can address) and a 32GB partition for the rest. Once in Windows 95 I can access that 32GB partition no problem, but when I boot into DOS mode I can only access the 8GB partition. I can directory list the 32GB partition but cannot access any files, I get an 'Error reading drive D' error.

That seems really weird to me. It looks like this might be one of the subtle distinctions between Windows 95B and Windows 95C.
http://www.mdgx.com/secrets.htm#FAT32

The easiest way to check would be to get a Windows 95C boot floppy (or a Windows 98 boot floppy) and see if that lets you access the entire disk.

candle_86 wrote:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-ISA-Controller-Ca … e4AAOSwo3pWeEXN

Found this, dunno if there is an updated bios to support a large drive however

This looks like an EIDE MAX, which is still haunted by the 8.4GB limit. I couldn't find a BIOS update to make it support larger disks.
Promise did make two ISA cards that support IDE drives up to 128GB: EIDE MAX II and its BIOS-only version, DriveMAX.

Thanks for the replies guys, I am using Win95B. I tried a Win98 startup floppy but had the same issue in DOS, I've read that Windows accesses the drive directly rather than using BIOS which is why it can read the full amount, whereas DOS uses the BIOS which in my case limits it to 8GB.

I have however found a solution, I was using MaxBlast 4 which was Ontrack DDO. I was under the belief I could uninstall the DDO, access the drive in intermediary PC to copy files on/off etc., reinstall the DDO and use the drive in my Aptiva again. Ontrack wouldn't allow me to do that, however using MaxBlast Plus II which uses EZ-BIOS instead of Ontrack, I can do this. All I need to do now is uninstall the DDO to access it on another machine, and reinstall it to use it in the Aptiva. Problem solved!

I'm only getting like 300KB/s over my ethernet card, so for transferring the whole install to a new larger hard drive, I really wanted to use a modern machine haha. Thanks for the suggestions 😀