Not to long ago I combined a 486 and 386 I own by putting the 486 motherboard into the 386 mini tower and kept both hard drives. The 486 had an internal cd rom drive, so I replaced the 5 1/4 floppy drive with the cd rom. The only problem is, the IDE floppy/hard drive controller only recognises 2 hard drive devices so I can either have the 2 hard drives hooked up, or one hard drive and the cd rom. I was wondering if buying a second IDE controller would eliminate that problem.
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It should, but does your 486 have a PCI BUS? If not, you may have fun getting another controller for it nowadays unless you have some old one kicking around.
Most systems even 486’s that have the IDE controller built in have two IDE connectors on the motherboard One for channel A and the other for Channel B. Each IDE channel can support 2 devices so you should be able to put 4 IDE drives in it. What model motherboard is it and I’ll see what I can track down
It would be very unusual indeed to see a 486 motherboard that would only support 2 total IDE devices. Perhaps if you can post the make/model of Board, we can find something out to help you.
if you have an open PCI slot, yes you can add a controller card
but like everyone else has said, you should be able to have 4 IDE devices (not counting floppies) – so you shouldnt need one.
generally seaking, the primary and secondary IDE controllers are right next to one another on the motherboard – take a look and I bet you’ll see a place to plug in another IDE ribbon cable
Do you have HDD 1 plugged into channel A and HDD 2 plugged into channel B? If so, connect both HDD to channel A on one ribbon cable with two connectors, and plug the CD-ROM into channel B.
Yes buying a IDE adapter would solve your problem. You will most likely need an ISA based apapter or VLB slot based controller depending on your MB options. Most ISA based IDE adapter cards have 2 IDE ports that can handle one master/slave pair each. The less sophisticated cards will require that you defeat the onboard controller in BIOS so it will have access to both IRQ’s 14 and 15 which govern these channels. The more sophisticated ones work with the existing IRQ 's so you will have a total of 6 IDE devices possible.
These basic IDE cards are typically a few dollars each on Ebay. I have a top of the line Promise DC4030VL VLB slot based IDE controller card with it’s own BIOS I pulled from a 486 system a few years ago with slots for 30 pin cache SIMMS (if desired) and 2 IDE channels (4 devices) and 2 floppy channels etc. etc. that went for $ 139.00 back in the day that I’ll let you have free for just shipping costs if you want it. You may need to DL some setup drivers for it.
Some Soundblaster cards used to come with a non-booting onboard IDE controller for CD ROMS to address your setup scenario. If you can get one of these it will also solve your problem.
Actually, I have a soundblaster 16. Maybe I’ll see about that. I know that the most obvious solution is to get a big hard drive and copy the contents of both smaller drives onto it, but I’m looking for a cheap solution. Even though I’m into programming, computer hardware is still something I need to study up on some more. I know I have ISA slots, but I’m not sure about VLB. I would assume so thought. My current motherboard won’t be the one I’ll be using for long though. I was trying to add some more memory and was a little rought with it and ruined one or two memory slots, so I bought a new 486 motherboard and will be getting it soon. I think I read in the description that it has one or two VLB slots. Let me see about my Soundblaster first. Thanks.
Arrghh! It doesn’t work!
Liked the response!
Uhg, I don’t believe this. I checked out the cables. The hard drive cable (and floppy drive cable) only had 2 connectors. So I got another connector, and connected the CD ROM to my SoundBlaster 16, but when I hooked up the floppy and hard cables back to the drives and the controller card and turned my computer back on, my floppy light was continuously lit and I got an error message saying that there’s a hard drive and floppy drive failure. I don’t get it, there’s one cable hooked up to both hard drives and the controller, so why isn’t the computer recognizing it? And I have a cable connecting the floppy drive the controller, so why isn’t it recognizing it either? Thankfully when the new motherboard I bought on eBay comes in I can have some professionals install it and fix my problem, but what did I do wrong? I thought I hooked everything up like it was before I disconnected it. Oh well.
Most likely you have either:
1: Inadvertently reversed the cable orientation on the hard drive and/or floppy so that they are not plugged in correctly. This will cause the problems you describe. Double check that the red stripe in the IDE cable is next to where the 4 pin molex power connector plugs in on the drive and that pin 1 on the red stripe side corresponds with the pin 1 marking on the motherboard.
Floppy cable are often not marked with polarization notches so it’s easy to reverse them. Check the floppy cable polarization per the example for the hard drive and make sure it’s seated propertly.
2: Not seated the cable headers correctly. Unplug and replug making sure all pins are correclty aligned as they go into the cable header and you are not just plugging in
the top or bottom row of pins accidently.
3: Depending on the model, the IDE adapter section of the SB card may have be activated via a software setup procedure (or by jumpers) that re-flashes the sound card BIOS and turns the IDE option on or off. If the OS is not recognizing the IDE adapter attached to the card you will need to play with the settings a bit.
Most Creative Labs SoundBlaster16 cards came with Panasonic CD-ROM interfaces. They use the same 40 pin connector ATAPI drives use, but are incompatible. Check the silkscreening at the connector on the SB16. If it says “Panasonic”, you’re out of luck unless you have an (very) old Panasonic CD-ROM drive lying around. Other variants included the SB16-MultiCD, that had ATAPI, Panasonic, Mitsumi, and Sony proprietary interfaces, the SB16-SCSI, which had a 50 pin SCSI-II interface driven by a pretty standard Adaptec controller chip, and the SB16-PnP, which did have an ATAPI interface. Some of the PnP and non-PnP basic SB16 cards had no CDROM interface at all. SB-AWE32 cards usually had the Panasonic interface. SB-AWE64 cards were all ATAPI or nothing at all.
I’ve never used the MultiCD version with Win9x so I can’t tell you if it requires special config software to activate a particular port. The others are all natively supported in Win9x.
wow a working 3and 4 86 ? brings back memories of my first ibm compatiable comp a pack 486 dx with a 450 meg hd a 4 speed cd rom and a 14.4 modem
nice thngs about it is if ya can find parts for it there dirt cheap
althouhg if its some conslation my moden network card and sound card was on com port 2 all of a sudden my computer forgot com port 2 existed so we had to take the stuff out and place it on com port one and the computer acted like everything was new once we did
so newer isnt better
Thanks for the tips astro. I’ll give them a try.
Yeah, my SB card has says Panasonic hear the 40 pin connector. I’m not sure what model the CD ROM is, but I don’t think it’s a Panasonic. Oh well.
The Panasonic interface on SB cards doesn’t just signify the brand, it is a specific proprietary interface that is different from ATAPI. All newer Panasonic drives are ATAPI or SCSI. While there may have been some 8x drives with the proprietary interface, most were 2x and 4x. Some are also branded as Matsushita, the parent company of Panasonic (which is really just a US brand name for Matsushita products).
You could dive into Creative’s web site to find the applicable model numbers to see if one you have lying around will work, but if the drive was previously working on an IDE controller, it most definitely will not work on your SB16.
Yes, it is working on an IDE controller. But it’s no biggie.
Astro, if you’re still want to, I’ll take you up on your offer for the Promise DC4030VL VLB slot based IDE controller card. Thank you very much.
Email me with your address and I’ll let you know what shipping is.