On Monday 26 January 2004 13:43, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> 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.
It partly depends on the boot rom on the MFM controller (I've had some
that were unhappy in a 'modern PC', and also depends on if you can
disable the onboard IDE and maybe floppy on the PC.
> 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).
That's because IDE and MFM hard drive controllers typically share the
same I/O ports. You should be able to leave your secondary IDE
enabled, but will almost definately have to disable your primary IDE
controller. Also, if there's a floppy controller on the same ISA card,
it'll conflict with the one on the motherboard, and you'll have to
disable one of the two.
> 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.
I'd bet the 386 will be much happier with the MFM controller.
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/
Received on Mon Jan 26 2004 - 14:44:39 GMT