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Hit a wall - PB Legend 610, CD ROM & IRQ 15

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First post, by echo5charlie

Posted on 
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Hello all!

I am trying to resurrect a new-to-me Packard Bell Legend 610 back to my 'glory days' of 1994.

I have run into a wall with getting a CD ROM drive installed. I have a BTC 1853l/1857l (ESS 1868f based) sound card that gives me the IDE controller for the CD ROM. I have enabled the IDE controller already and jumped it to IRQ 15. IRQ 12 is the only other option and the PS/2 mouse is already on that (as you know).

I have loaded the IDE Controller Enable program from ESS, no failures reported. Using a Cyberdrive 120D and Cyberdrive drivers I get...something...the activity light illuminates for a spell then fails. Other CD drivers do not work. This drive works in a P!!! system, so I have eliminated that as the failure point.

MSD reports IRQ 15 as BIOS reserved but Norton Diagnostics reports IRQ 15 as open. The PB400 motherboard only has one IDE channel so IRQ 15 should be 'free'.

The PB400 BIOS is VERY limited in what it can do, so I have no options there to change anything but the most basic settings. Simply adding the CD drive to the primary IDE channel as a slave does not work. I do not have a second ISA-based system to test the BTC card in, FWIW.

It kills me that 17-year-old me figured this out and 45-year-old me is struggling. I know I am forgetting something, any ideas?

Reply 1 of 2, by echo5charlie

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So I figured it out with a HUGE assist from running HWInfo. I needed to change the base address from 168 to 170. Amazingly, even though the CD driver failed to load and there were no reported failures from the IDE driver, HWInfo was able to 'see' the drive and I was then able to determine that I needed to change the ESS IDE driver switch in config.sys.

Now, this was a 'duh' situation. Back in the mid-90's I was able to replace my PB610 by 1997 (or so) with a more user-friendly Pentium system with a much better BIOS and I had simply forgotten that the secondary IDE controller at IRQ15 would be using 170 as the base address. I simply haven't thought of that is 25 +/- years!

Anyway, I hope that this may help someone in the future having a similar issue.

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