Bought one of these off ebay like a doofus thinking i could use it to boot a hard drive in an old industrial PC (actually the guts of an old point of sale system - ISA backplane and single-board cx486slc2-50 computer).

Very disappointing to see that the bios on it won't even try to boot an IDE hard drive. And the bios on the computer won't see the tertiary or quaternary interface.

Thought I'd join the forum to share some wisdom, since this is one of the few places I've found with google that crufty old gear like this actually gets discussed.

It's been noticed by more than one person that the FloppyMAX appears to be almost exactly an EIDEMAX card.

It sure is.

To convert it to a normal primary or secondary IDE card you'll need a soldering iron, some solder wick, some flux, and some jumper pin strip. Or just a bit of wire if you want to hard-wire the IRQ.

Apply some extra flux to your solder wick and use it to empty out the through-holes for the other three IRQ jumpers. Then solder in six more jumper pins. I used two strips of 3, you could use 3 strips of 2, or just hard-wire the irq you want. The 'fingers' are there and connected. You just need to select the irq you want.

The other difference on the EIDE-MAX is that it has R7 and R8 instead of R9 and R10.

R7 and R10 are both "0 ohm" resistors which are basically just a juper wire that a pick-n-place robot can pick and place as though it were just another resistor.

R8 and R9 are both 4.7k resistors.

So, use some more of the solder wick to suck the excess solder out of the through-holes for R8 and R7, and to desolder R9 and R10.

The install the 0-ohm (single black stripe) in the R7 position and the 4.7k in the R8 position. Peel off the stickers, set your jumpers, and go to town.

I disabled the bios because right now i don't need special bios to boot a 16-meg disk-on-module. my expectation is that it's still going to look for an LS-120 drive rather than anything else.

If you had the XT-IDE universal bios installed in the bios socket, it would probably boot without modification, and it would boot from any drive on any port too. But I don't have an eprom programmer. Unfortunately, the bios chip on this card is what's called one-time-programmable. Basically an oldschool eprom without a window that you can use to expose it to UV light to erase it. I've heard rumors that a dental x-ray can be used to erase these, but you still can't prrogram it on the card itself - you need a programming interface.

If you had a 28-pin flash device of the right sort of specifications, you Might be able to use a linux box with an RTL8139 network card to write it, using ct-flasher. I have never done this, but you can read about it here:

http://ctflasher.sourceforge.net/

Alternately, if you know someone with an XTIDE card, they can burn a prom for you on their card.

I might look into it myself if i decide i want a bigger playground than the DOM i have installed now.