mcknight@tusun2.knet.utulsa.edu ( Law) (08/29/90)
>I have the exact same problem with an AT&T 6386 SX. In my case, >the hard disk controller that came with the system is built in to >the motherboard. If anyone knows how to add a hard card to such a >system please post a reply. I suspect that only one hard disk controller >can exist in the computer at a time (but I could be wrong :-) ). >Thanks >dan k. >dmk@lcuxlf.ATT.COM Not sure if this will apply to hard cards, but it does apply to adding an additional hard drive controller to an XT. I pulled this down from a local bbs, and it DOES work. From the Galaxy BBS: The way to have up to 4 hard drives on a pc/xt is this. First obtain a wd1002-wx1 or wd1002-swx1 (short card, mfm format), you could use a wd1002-27x rll card if you had that capibility on both primary hard drives. Make sure it has a "SUPER BIOS" from Western Digital. If you can get one burned I can send you a binary file to burn a new bios for the card. Next get a second controller card, it is a wd1002-27x as its the only one that can have its address and i/o ports changed, leave it set as primary controller, remove the primary controller from your system and hook up the second 27x controller card. Make sure that you have it hooked to the 1 or 2 new drives you are going to add. Set the drives up as you would for normal drives c an d. remove any terminating resistors from the first drive and make the drives select as normal drives c and d. Then do the lowlevel format on them, Now after you format one or both drives then obtain a copy of disk manager from ontrack version 3.04 or higher, use it to set up and partition the drive, dont use the default partitions that its is set for, use manual installation, and in this case allocate all the first partition to "READ/WRITE" not dos. do the same for drive 2 if attached. Next use Disk Manager to format the partition, you wont be able to boot from it but we dont care about booting from either of these drives, they are intended to be external drives "E and F". Shut the system down and remove the rll card we have been working with and re-install the orginal card, it should be still attached to the primary drives c and d. Next we have to change 2 jumpers on the card, they are jumpers labeled "W8" and "W4". As purchased both jumpers should be on pins 2 to 3, move them to 1 to 2. Thats it, your all set, now plug the controller into any avaliable slot and boot the system up. You will not be able to use the extra drives yet so dont try. Next thing you need to do is get the disk manager disk and copy the hard disk driver to the c drive and add the driver to the config.sys file. I have mine in the first line. Thats it, now reboot the system and it should find all the hard drives. One side note, i had a bug in my super bios rom, seems there was a masking error and the primary controller was reporting more than 2 hard drives being attached to it, a good work arround is to use the assign command and assign e f f g, what you will end up with is one extra drive identifyer thats on the same drive also western digital has fixed the problem but there are some old stock destributors that may have the old roms still so, you can use it as is or call western digital and request a new "Super Bios rom" its number is 62000-94002. This number is Western Digitals part number so a destributor may not know or care what it is, you will have to call WD to get it, mine cost 25.00. I got the "Disk Manager" software when i bought the miniscribe hard drive. It came with it. I have this running on my system now and it works great, i have not even changed out the funny rom yet. I just have drive g and drive h as the same volume. To get arround the phantom drive problem i put the assign command as the first command in my autoexec.bat file. it looks like this: assign c c d d e f f g g h i i Be sure that the assign command is avaliable to execute as the first command or you can set up your path command first then use the assign command. If you get it running let me know. If you cant i am at 918-835-9669 most of the time. I run my own independant computer service business. I cannot guarantee it will work on all systems but this is what is working on my system. After 6 months of trying different things too. Mike Lester Galaxy Computer, INC. Galaxy Computer HST (1:19/11, 7:771/1, 99:9099/1, 11:771/1) Chuck