they all had drive tables in BIOS most had a user selected type 47 in which you could add custom drive types. Any isa IDE card should work. Most ide cards also have 1 parallel and 1 or 2 serial ports on them and a floppy controller. Check Ebay or Amazon i see some as cheap as $14.00

appleiiguy wrote:

they all had drive tables in BIOS most had a user selected type 47 in which you could add custom drive types. Any isa IDE card should work. Most ide cards also have 1 parallel and 1 or 2 serial ports on them and a floppy controller. Check Ebay or Amazon i see some as cheap as $14.00

ah ok i understand - so you mean something like this?

http://www.ebay.at/itm/gear-GoldStar-ISA-Cont … =item20f3c8dc67

Yes. Usually there weren't any I/O on 386 motherboards - only some brand names like IBM, Compaq... used all-in-one motherboards. Any ISA I/O controller is OK - if it is in working condition.

great, thanks!

just noticed that one of the boards is the ASUS ISA-386C which seems to be the very first board, ASUS ever made 😲 😲 😲

Even in the 486 ISA/VLB era, you usually needed a multi-I/O card - onboards tended to come in with the 486 PCI

As said, you need an ISA controller card. They usually give you serial, parallel, maybe game port as well as FDD and one, maybe two IDE channels.

I have tried a LOT of controllers and hands down the one that works most often is the Goldstar Prime 2. So that one gets my vote. Got a ton of others with Winbond chip and none of them work which is odd but it is what it is.

I use a SIIG EIDE Master ISA in my 286-12. It has a onboard bios to support LBA up to 8.4 Gb. 2 IDE ports and 1 floppy port. no com / lpt ports.

Yeah, the only port on 386-era motherboards is the keyboard DIN. All others must be added with ISA cards.
The progress is the very slow thing. 😀

This is why I like OEM desktops: comes completely working. Building is expensive with all parts added up.

thanks for all the information!

my first own pc was a 286 from the dump (there were already 486) and my second own pc was a 2nd hand 386 when already Pentium 1 were around.

however as i was a kid back then, i didn't dare to open one of these computers. the first pc i opened was my Pentium 1 in 1995 and the first PC i assembled by myself was an AMD K6-2 400 so I don't really have deep hardware knowledge of anything before Socket 7 allthough I'm very interested, reading and learning very much as I've spent quite a lot time with many pre-Socket 7 machines back then...

edit: i'm now planning to build a system based on the asus isa-386c, already got a 386 cpu and placed bids on I/O, vga and sound cards. the only thing that will be hard to get is a nice, decent AT case.