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Anyone put a current PCI IDE/PATA controller in a 486? Would it work?

Yes, it will work with a little patience. The limiting factor is whether or not you have PCI slot on your mobo and it appears that you do. Also, you may need an overlay to realize the full capacity of you hard drive. Let us know what type of mobo and hard drive that you have.
 
It's an Acer OEM 486 machine (Assembled in Australia). And I have found zero documentation so far. However I took lots of images and with the help of others we figured out most jumper settings and features :D

The reason I'm asking is because this machine only has a single IDE channel and doesn't like an optical drive and CF card at the same time. Both work fine on their own though!

Indeed the machine has a 500MB limit. I haven't managed to install the drive overlay software yet. The machine only has 4MB Ram (onboard RAM) and that wasn't enough. The ram disk that these tools create (Maxblast 4, WDs version) are 6MB. I got these of the current "Ultimate Boot CD". I did have these two RAM sticks, but i can't find them anymore :-(

But yea if i could add another IDE channel to this machine (let's say just the CD drive) hooked up to a PCI card, I would be very happy. I could use a sound card with the right CD-drive, but the SB Pro 2.0 only has the Philips interface and the other slot is for a Midiman MM401 to drive Roland gear.

PC:

img0053h.jpg


Board overview:

img0122rc.jpg


Images of the expansion cards:

img0071be.jpg


This should be the onboard VLB IDE controller:

img0099ye.jpg
 
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Wow. Haven't seen one of those Acers in a long time. I had one many years ago. One thing I remember very well about that thing is how big of a pain in the neck it was to take the cover on and off.

A PCI IDE controller should work fine - I've used a Promise IDE card in several 486's over the years. Other than being designed in a particularly annoying way (case, riser board, etc) there isn't anything particularly special about the Acer. I had a 2 gig drive in mine, I don't remember any BIOS limitation per say, but, then again, that was a long time ago.

-Ian
 
There is a gentle way to take the cover off. The front thing has two clips at the bottom. Push them in and take the front thing off.

Then you just slide the top cover back and remove it. Done!

The drives show up with the correct capacity in BIOS and POST. But when you fdisk them you only get ~ 500 MB. I take it this is the BIOS limitation right there...

That PCI IDE card is cheap enough I think. So even if it doesn't work, it's not a bid deal. So I guess I will just grab it and see how I go.

What I found "special" about this machine is the lack / non existence of documentation. On the other hand the jumpers are all well labelled and obvious.

I got this machine because there are virtually ZERO 486 machines in Australia. And this one was local and complete and not even expensive. So I just HAD to grab it :D

Having said that, I enjoy my Super Socket 7 machine a lot more. With the "disable cache" tricks it's just as flexible as well.
 
Adding a secondary channel to a unit with an integrated primary channel can be a little dicey. If you can, disable the on-board IDE and go with a two-channel PCI controller with BIOS on it, such as a Promise that used to be packed with retail IDE drive upgrades (e.g. Maxtor).

But forget the 3 SATA+IDE card--it comes with no BIOS support. Basically, the idea is that you boot Windows (or whatever) from another drive and then load the RAID drivers for this card. It is possible to "splice" a BIOS driver into your existing BIOS, but I think a 486 is a little too early. I have done it, however, with a SS7 board successfully.

Maybe that IDE card that you linked to will work.
 
I went to the VIA VT6421 chip description and it seems that there's SATA support and one IDE channel. I don't see a BIOS chip on the board, although there is one unpopulated position on the board that might well be a provision for BIOS.

Item 160618756523 looks like it might do the trick, however.
 
Cool!

Haven't looked at used items yet.

Promise and Silicon Image seem to be the two main brands.
 
I'd nab a promise ultra66/100 and mod it to a raid card. Cheap and work on 5v pci. :thumbsup: Make sure whatever card you have will work on pci 1.0/1.1. Alot of modern cards will not.

Here's one for 8 dollars shipped. The mod is easy, just requires a single resistor and the fasttrak bios image. And it does indeed have onboard bios. It also works with my ide to sata adapter. I own 4 of these cards, all in early p1/p2 systems.
http://cgi.ebay.com/PROMISE-ULTRA66...853?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eaf3fe915

My ide to sata *bilaterall* adapter (works both ways sata to ide and ide to sata) - $5.80 shipped
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/sata-ide-bilateral-converter-board-5458
 
I'm assuming that the OP is in Australia, since that was his eBay link--some of the US-offered stuff may not be accessible to him.

I ran down the specs on the SIL0860 chip and it's 33MHz PCI and 5V tolerant (note the regulator on the board). So it should be okay. But you bring up an excellent point--PCI was very new on the 486, so it could be quirky--and it's probably a given that it isn't going to work with newer PCI cards.
 
Shame I didn't notice that he lives in AUS... need more coffee! LOL! The bilateral converter would be same price for him anywhere in the world, DX includes shipping in all prices. So at least one link was useful! :thumbsup:
 
Those are beautiful machines, with REALLY nice onboard video, heh (Tseng ET4000 iirc)..

Promise UltraATA cards work on my Socket 5 Pentium box just fine (same era), so I imagine that a Socket 3 board with PCI should have an equal capacity to use them - including the ATA133 card, mind you, though that might be overkill depending on what you're up to (I think I'm the only one who finds they need more than 20GB on a 486, as fast as possible.. :p).
 
twolazy said:
My ide to sata *bilaterall* adapter (works both ways sata to ide and ide to sata) - $5.80 shipped
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/sata-ide-bilateral-converter-board-5458
Click to expand...

Now that's an interesting gadget! Will get one for sure, that seems quite useful especially for the optical drives...

These little gadgets coming from China and other asian countries are very cheap for us to get in Australia. Postage is cheap but you will wait ~ 2 weeks though: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330519204691&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT (AUD 2.44 shipped WOW)
 
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Mau1wurf1977 said:
Now that's an interesting gadget! Will get one for sure, that seems quite useful especially for the optical drives...

These little gadgets coming from China and other asian countries are very cheap for us to get in Australia. Postage is cheap but you will wait ~ 2 weeks though: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330519204691&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT (AUD 2.44 shipped WOW)
Click to expand...

I've got a few of those, but haven't had the opportunity to try them. It's not clear that ATAPI devices (e.g. CD-ROM/DVD drives) will work, nor is it clear how large (>250GB) SATA drives are handled by an IDE BIOS. Perhaps a drive overlay could be installed. Mine arrived here in the US in about a week.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
Oh, so you need a SATA card with an SSD, then?
Click to expand...
Nah I get by just fine with drive overlay software and/or a PCI IDE card and large IDE disks ranging from 80GB (a bit cramped for me) to 750GB (which I only have one disk of that size, and would like to put in my Presario, but it's being used for other things atm..). BTW, not that anybody here probably cares, but MS-DOS lags with the default shell when doing a DIR command on a disk that big, even in third party tools, because of counting the free space and the method they used for it. FreeDOS and many other DOSes and shells don't do it. Just thought I'd get that out there while on that topic. If I could put SATA in my DOS boxen I might.. perhaps an IDE->SATA adapter will be how I keep my boxes running when my IDE disks all die, and it may well be SSDs because normal HDDs could be phased out by that distant future.. xD

Just "for the lulz", I once put a 750GB disk in my IBM 5160 via the XT-IDE adapter - I just wanted to do it once. :p

(Excuse my off-topic rambling, I apologize!)
 
I love it!

I like these kind of "Let's see what's possible" projects...

Now we just need to break that 2TB barrier in DOS :D
 
Raven said:
...but MS-DOS lags with the default shell when doing a DIR command on a disk that big, even in third party tools, because of counting the free space and the method they used for it...
Click to expand...
off topic:
I hear that...MS-DOS hangs a REALLY long time computing free space on my 286 systems with 10 and 20gb drives (split down to 2gb partitions), seems they never really thought 2gb partitions would be used on old slow 286's ;-)
on topic:
If you go with a card with its own BIOS on it, you shouldn't need any kind of overlay for modern drives. You will however still have to deal with any limitations of the OS you are using (IE MS-DOS 6.22 has no FAT32, so you are limited to 2gb FAT16 partitions)
 
Got the PCI card the other day. I ordered the one that said "DOS bootable" in the product description.

Well no BIOS chip on the card and nothing at POST. Card works fine under Puppy Linux however. Had a chat with the eBay shop and got a refund. Can keep the card which is nice :D
 
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