Upgrading early BIOS - Drive Overlay

[Tom Peters]

At 04:45 PM 8/11/2008 -0700, you wrote:
>On 11 Aug 2008 at 18:14, Michael Lee wrote:
>
> > Remember there were also the utilities to fool the PC into using larger
> > sized disks, but I never liked those at all.  Most hard drives in that
> > time period came with the Ontrack, EZDrive, Disk Manager, MaxBlast,
> > programs.  The Disk Drive Oveylay programs do a software convert of the
> > BIOS settings and actual settings and make it boot/work, usually.  These
> > altered the MBR to sit there, and these have their issues and were
> > always a last resort.  The drives do NOT swap into other machines well,
> > and any issue, esp with the MBR would pretty much cause a FAIL.
>
>The  "disk managers" usually just install their own memory-resident
>drivers from the first track of the hard drive, then conceal that
>first track from view.  The shortcoming was that (a) it cost some RAM
>and (b) if you used an OS that was unaware of the drive overlay,
>things could get pretty screwed up.
>
>ISTR that there was also a BIOS extension ROM card that plugged into
>an ISA slot to provide the necessary functionality.

I still have my AMIDISK IDE Bios extension card. If you have an MFM drive, 
this is obviously no help. It's a little ISA bus card with a ROM. a 74F244 
chip, and another chip with an AMI copyright sticker over the chip  number. 
The ROM is labeled "AMIDISK V1.1 IDE Extension" and the board also has 
jumpers for address selection and 32k eprom vs. 64k eprom. The addresses 
seem to be C800 CC00 D000 D400 D800 DC00.

I have the original plastic shell it was shipped in, manual, and invoice 
showing I paid $67.25

The manual is 10 pages. It mentions that the card allows support of one or 
two IDE controllers, one to four drives, LBA to allow exceeding 528mb, 
works with any system BIOS, and automagically detects and configures 
drives. Also supports non-LBA modes. The card has no other connectors other 
than the ISA bus and address/config jumpers.

Please make offer. I'd love to unload this to someone that can make good 
use of it.


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