Worst case scenario you should be able to use the 8-bit XT-IDE board. It's got an EEPROM socket where you can put the XT-IDE firmware.

Maybe something like the Promise 9446-00 EIDE Max?

SC-JEe012 with enhanced BIOS?

I'm sure this machine has standard BIOS with 45 predefined HDD's + one for user. So you can use any standard I/O controller card. RLL/MFM/IDE... it doesn't matter to the BIOS.

I'll try to test it out, when I get that machine. If no "special" controller card is required, I will probably get a standard then.
Manual's are hard to come by online, so I will have to wait for it to arrive alongside the machine.
If a standard controller works, then I will search for an ISA vga-card. Ega is nice to have, and nice that the original EGA monitor comes with it too.
Just that... Well... I like VGA better. Finally I will probably get a nice and decent SB16 card for it.

You likely thought about this already, but have you considered Dynamic Drive Overlay software?

For my 386 gear, I use a standard GoldStar Prime IO controller and using DDO software I was able to use a 32 GB CF card and MS-DOS 7.1 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

You likely thought about this already, but have you considered Dynamic Drive Overlay software?

For my 386 gear, I use a standard GoldStar Prime IO controller and using DDO software I was able to use a 32 GB CF card and MS-DOS 7.1 😀

It had crossed my mind, though a real plattered drive are more my thing.
Standard ISA controllers seem to be cheaper than a CF-ISA controller, and I do have a couple of those 400, 600 or 1024mb drives in store.
Drive overlays are a possibility, if the BIOS on the motherboard does support user defined drives.
Well... Have to see, when I get that machine. Nothing wrong about being in front of any issues I guess. 😉

Oh, DDO also works with IDE drives of course!

So if you have a 20 GB IDE drive, that will work as well. I was just using a CF card because that's what I had available.

DDO just works, I can highly recommend it. Let me know if you want to give it a go, I have all the downloads + instructions on my website 😀

Last time I used DDO's, were when I had a 486dx2-66 with a "Side-JR-Pro" VL-Bus controller and a 850mb HDD.
It was a Quantum trailblaizer if I remember correctly. A friend had a Fireball from the same manufactor.

If the BIOS does support user defined HDD's.
Could the controller on a SB16 theoretical be used for this?
It's only a thought I have.

IDE ports on sound cards cannot be booted from, and I think they only support CD drives anyway.

alexanrs wrote:

IDE ports on sound cards cannot be booted from, and I think they only support CD drives anyway.

I don't know. I had one of those too many years ago, but it had no BIOS and my BIOS only supported 2 IDE channels. Maybe if you find a suitable BIOS that support 4 IDE channels (mine was third channel) it would boot.

Zup wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

IDE ports on sound cards cannot be booted from, and I think they only support CD drives anyway.

I don't know. I had one of those too many years ago, but it had no BIOS and my BIOS only supported 2 IDE channels. Maybe if you find a suitable BIOS that support 4 IDE channels (mine was third channel) it would boot.

No, it will most probably not. According to my experience (and knowledge) IDE interfaces on SB sound cards are single drive, non bootable and optical only.

brostenen wrote:

What are there out in the wild? And what sort of cards should I look for? […]
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What are there out in the wild? And what sort of cards should I look for?

I am geting an old Unisys machine, that has MFM or RLL harddrive, and I actually want to change this.
So to avoid any limitation's regarding the BIOS in the machine, I need to find an ISA controller (16 or 8 bit), that have it's own BIOS for drives such as the 400/500mb harddrive's that I have in my box with sparedrives.

And what should I look for when browsing images? Something must indecate that a specific controller has this function.
I had this type of technology in the past, though it was a VL-Bus controller, and I actually have not seen a controller that can do this before VL-Bus. So.... This is an unknown field for me.

Thanks in advance.

I have a SIIG branded ISA controller with its o own BIOS, 2 channels (4 drives), bootable CD-ROM and up to 8GB HDD. I think you need to search for "ISA EIDE controller" since "EIDE" is the hip name for all the properties I mentioned above, during the times. They were mostly VL bus cards though, so ISA EIDE is probably a little bit rare.

alexanrs wrote:

Worst case scenario you should be able to use the 8-bit XT-IDE board. It's got an EEPROM socket where you can put the XT-IDE firmware.

+1 on that. Or this: https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_Co … ter_revision_2b

Worst case scenario you can stick the XT-IDE BIOS in an EPROM chip on an ISA network card in the boot ROM socket. It will work just fine with the IDE controller from a generic multi-I/O card. I'm doing this in a XT clone.

Like booting Pata drives connected to an ISA soundcard, when having that Bootrom on the netcard?
That would somehow just be awesome, because none is doing it.

Its not that useful. Sound card IDE ports do not work on 8-bit machines, and on 486+ machines they are much slower than anything PCI or VLB. If you can get a sound card to read an HDD within Windows with the standard IDE driver, you should probably be able to get them to work through XT-IDE by hardcoding the correct IRQ and IO adresses. Will still be slower than an actual controller, probably, because the XT-IDE firmware uses 8-bit IO only.