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Usable DDO for a 40GB IDE HDD?

C

Cael Thunderwing

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May 9, 2014
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Warren, Michigan, United States
i recently aquired a "Midwest Micro" Elite PC (generic lil 486DX-33 system) including the manuals,it has a "MI3210V" Multi-IO VESA IDE Card that deals w/ Floppy/IDE/Ports, a SoundGalaxy Pro 16 Soundcard, the mainboard is a "UC 4913" (which looking up on google shows this is a VERRY early Elitegroup mainboard) a "SVGA-24"VESA videocard (it come sup as a CirrusLogic "Chettah XL" card and a Mitsumi FX001D DoubleSpeed CD-Rom (which i have Removed to run off the "MultiIO Card" s IDE channel for the Main HDD and a HP CD-Writer Plus drive) and a mysterious Fax Modem which i can only guess is between a 14.4 ~ 28.8k modem)

it orginally had 4MB Ram (this board uses 30Pin SIMMs) and have thus since added an extra 16MB Ram (4x4MB)

the only downside this system had a 206MB IDE HDD which was verry l;imiting w/ the games i was trying to stack ontop of Dos 6.22 (system came w/ 6.2 but i had old floppies w/ .22 onhand) and Windows 3.11 WFW

Shockingly, the controller card (the multi IO card) is able to detect or atleast pass onto various Dos utilities my only spare drive which is a Seagate 40GB salvaged from a iMac G3(Seagate ST340810A) and i'd like to use this Drive

i know i'll need a DDO as ... Well.. 40GB is beyond its Type 47 Specs. (if i let it Auto detect it see sit as a 8GB in the bios.)

i guess EZBios is my first step to try, anyone know where to Download it from that still works?
 
I just putzed around with this recently for my old 486 box.

If you are using FAT-16, you might be limited to 4 Partitions, so you might only be able to use 8GB of that drive.

For Maxtor Drives - use Maxblast
For Fujitsu - you can use DiskManager (by Ontrack) which is OEM branded by Seagate and Fujitsu both
For Seagate - see above
For Western Digital - Western Digital Data Lifeguard tools for DOS

In the BIOS, For type 47, you want to have the following parameters (usually) to make it look like a 528MB HDD to the system, or if you have auto-detect, you can use that too (that's what I used on my 486).

Cylinders = 1024
Heads = 16
Sectors Per Track = 63
Landzone = 65535 (or 0)
Total Capacity = somewhere around 528MB

After that, you boot up the machine with the DDO disk in it, and follow the directions on screen, it should get you there pretty easily. Please note, and I might not be right on this, but you might run into some partition size issues with FAT-16, so with anything beyond 8GB, you might want to consider using an O/S that supports FAT-32 if you have not done so already.
 
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The largest partition size you can get with FAT-16 is 2Gb and then you are limited by the total number of partitions you can have (20 something?). In all honesty, if I were you I'd just look at getting something that was less than 8Gb in size, possibly even a DOM type thing (2 or 4Gb).

Basically if you use the DDO and use DOS on that 40Gb drive at least half the drive would probably be wasted and unusable. To use it you would need to step up to FAT-32 (Windows 98 and beyond).
 
The master partition table allows for 4 primary partitions. If one of those is an extended partition, then I'm not aware of any particular limit to the number of logical drives in that extended partition.
 
lutiana said:
Basically if you use the DDO and use DOS on that 40Gb drive at least half the drive would probably be wasted and unusable. To use it you would need to step up to FAT-32 (Windows 98 and beyond).
Click to expand...
Don't you mean Windows 95B(OSR 2.0) onwards? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154997 Some later Dos variants support it natively as well- IMSs REAL/32 ver 7.92 for example, which can be installed as a single user OS on 386s up.
 

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Caluser2000 said:
Don't you mean Windows 95B(OSR 2.0) onwards? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154997 Some later Dos variants support it natively as well- IMSs REAL/32 ver 7.92 for example, which can be installed as a single user OS on 386s up.
Click to expand...

I was not 100% sure if 95 supported it so decided to err on the side of caution, now I know. And that's a good point about later DOS variants, on a 486 you don't have to stick with MS-DOS 6.22; didn't think of that.
 
I thought I replied to this the other day, must not have hit post, Anyways....

I have Seagate and Quantum OEM versions of Ontrack DiskManager on my download page. Should work perfectly on your 486 with a Seagate drive! I have used it on some 286 boxes with much success (though with lots of 2gb partitions only running DOS 6.22).
 
I have a Midwest Micro Elite laptop and in it I have a 2gb compact flash card for the hard drive. Since the bios clearly won't work with that I have put IBM Ontrack DDO on there. I've also used the IBM Ontrack DDO on two Compaq LTE Elites and a NEC 4050c, all different size compact flash drives from 512mb to 8gb. IBM Ontrack doesn't seem to care the brand of your hard drive and I found that it worked across all of my machines where some of the other DDOs like Maxblast did not. I can dig up my floppy image for IBM Ontrack if you can't find one. This site (http://vintage-pc.tripod.com/hdd_utils.html) has a whole slew of DDOs, I've tried quite a few of them.

The only machine I haven't gotten a CF card to work in is a IBM 755c laptop.
 
The internet of course. Seek and ye shall find. Due to respecting vcfs policy direct links would be unwise. It's been around since the early-mid 2000s. Quite a nice compilation of useful Dos programs.
 
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