First post, by Fimbulvetr
I decided to upgrade a 486dx2-66 I recently picked up. It came with no drives and no audio card, so I plunked in some stuff I had sitting around the house. Here is what I started with before I tried upgrading:
Motherboard: SER 486-VLA with 256 kb cache, ALI chipset, AMI bios
Video: 2 mb Cirrus Logic VLB graphics card
Audio: Edison Gold 16 ES688F audio card
RAM: 8mb 30-pin parity
Storage: Maxtor 80 mb hard drive, an old Hewlett Packard cd-rom drive, floppy drive, GOTEK floppy emulator.
Other: generic I/O IDE controller card, network card
Operating System: DOS 6.22
The 80 mb hd was plugged into the IDE controller card, the cd-rom was plugged into the IDE port on the audio card. The computer ran perfectly with this setup, but I wanted to add a second, larger hard drive because 80 mb doesn't go far. My options are a 8 Gb Maxtor HD, which was partitioned into four 2 Gb partitions with Win 7 or a 1 Gb CF card plugged into a cheap CF to IDE adapter. The motherboard BIOS detects the 8 gb hd and 1 gb CF. But then my problems begin... if I use the 8 gb hd as my second drive, only the first partition is mounted as D:, and the CD-rom is mounted as E:. If I remove the CD-rom, it still only finds the first partition. If I use the 1 gb CF card as my second HD, the CD-rom is not mounted.
Any advice as to what I could be doing wrong? The master/slave settings on the drives are set correctly. I have installed the Edison Gold 16 drivers. From what I can tell the drive geometry is set up correctly -- I checked it with whatIDE.
I also upgraded the RAM from 8 mb to 32 mb as I had some 4 mb simms sitting around, which went fine except SimCity 2000 overran the memory and reported negative memory, and was then unstable when I ran it. Is there really any use to having more than 8 mb of ram in this computer? I only intend on using it with 80's to early 90's dos software, and I have a Mac SE/30 I could plunk the 32 mb into. I'm thinking I may be better just going back to 8 mb ram.