AHCIFIX.386 -a VxD that allows Windows 3.1 Enhanced Mode to be used with AHCI (SATA) controllers \ VOGONS

AHCIFIX.386 -a VxD that allows Windows 3.1 Enhanced Mode to be used with AHCI (SATA) controllers

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First post, by OMORES

Posted on 2024-04-27, 19:26

OMORES Offline

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A guy (PluMGMK) wrote a VxD AHCI driver (ahcifix.386) to run Windows 3.1 on his Intel Z97 motherboard/Intel 4th Gen CPU. Operation was successful...

However, it turns out that the buggy AHCI firmware operations this driver is addressing (and the author believed are particular to his hardware/AHCI firmware/BIOS) are present on later AHCI firmware iterations as well and now ahcifix.386 can act more like an universal driver compatible with almost every motherboard with SATA ports. This driver is about real mode requests that AHCI protocol can handle natively, so won't offer by any means 32bit disk access.

Here you can download ahcifix.386 and read some interesting technical info: https://github.com/PluMGMK/ahcifix.386

Here you can watch "ahcifix" in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSqyZxbyHww

My latest video: NT 4.0 running from M.2 PCI-E AHCI SSD.

Reply 1 of 1, by rmay635703

Posted on 2024-04-27, 21:28

rmay635703 Offline

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If I could give a thumbs up to this I would.

This particular solution has been floating around a couple years now but nobody has done a write up or cared about it until recently.

Thanks for the writeup. Running on bare metal is always interesting and 3.11 is old enough that real mode operations aren’t a big deal.

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