Sellam,
I'm using a Gigabyte board with the HX-Chipset to test my MFM- and RLL-drives.
It works fine, just make sure you turn of the onboard IDE-controllers and onboard floppy-controller.
In general, MFM-drives take a long time to turn into ready state, too long for these kinds of motherboards such as they declare your harddrive faulty.
So what I do is resetting the mainboard. Enough time is elapsed, the drive meanwhile ready to perform the "working test" done by the board.
Pierre
>
> I haven't played with MFM hard drives and controllers in a LONG time
> (about 10 years now) so I have some questions.
>
> I'll start off easy. Should there be any reason an old 16-bit ISA MFM
> controller won't work properly in a Pentium-class PC with ISA and PCI
> slots? I imagine I would just have to configure the BIOS to reserve the
> proper interrupt (I believe it's 14, correct?) for the MFM controller.
>
> I did all this but the MFM controller wreaked havoc on the system. It
> killed the on-board floppy disk and IDE controllers (not physically killed
> but basically disabled them and the system couldn't boot).
>
> I'm trying to determine if there is a natural conflict before I venture
> forth with this configuration. This may be a problem related to the PC
> I'm trying to plug the card into because there are other oddities with the
> IDE controller that is preventing the system from booting with 4 hard
> drives installed (2 per IDE interface). It halts after it auto-recognizes
> the drives on the primary controller. Weird.
>
> Anyway, any insight would be appreciated.
>
> I'm going to do more experimentation in the meantime. I'll get another PC
> with ISA and PCI slots to work with, and will also find an old 386 to test
> the MFM controller on to make sure it is working fine.
>
> --
>
> Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
>
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Received on Thu Jan 29 2004 - 04:29:55 GMT