wlsmith@valve.heart.rri.uwo.ca (Wayne Smith) (05/26/91)
Just have a few questions about IDE drives in general, the ST1144A (125 MB) in particular... I just got one from California Microchip, but no setup disk (was I suposed to get something like Disk Manager?) It came with a ASKA-2839 controller card. On booting, my 286 system doesn't know its there, and, using debug, I can't find any sort of IDE bios (I was looking for a run address of some sort, maybe to do a low level format or verify the surface - something that would indicate the existance of the drive). DOS 4.01 Fdisk says I have no hard drives. So, is an IDE version of Disk Manager needed here? Just what is the nature of an IDE interface (ie- is it like having the guts of an MFM or RLL controller card built into the drive with a pitance of bus interface as the controller card)? If so, is the drive (instead of the controller) i/o mapped? Do IDE drives even have a bios, or do they load some sort of driver as they boot? I have played quite a bit with mixing/matching MFM, RLL, and SCSI drives, and IDE is new to me.... Inquiring minds want (NEED!) to know...