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 Using !PCConfig

4.11 Using direct IDE drives
Expansion Cards permit up to two IDE hard disks to be connected directly to the PC card itself. You may prefer to get your dealer to help you install and set up this drive. 

If you have two drives, they must be configured as ‘master and slave. Details of the link settings needed can be obtained from your drive supplier.

  • Even if you have a hard drive connected to your PC card, you may want to set up a PC partition accessible from the PC desktop, for ease of moving files back and forth between the two environments. This partition need not be your boot drive.

Setting up an IDE drive

To set up an IDE drive do the following: 
  1. Install the hard disk in a spare drive bay in your computer. The disk must be fixed to a suitable mounting bracket inside the computer.
  2. Connect the drive to the connector JP1 on the PC Expansion Card using a 40-way ribbon connector. Ensure that pin 1 on the IDE drive connector and pin 1 of the JP1 connector (at the top right of the connector, nearest the 486 chip on the card) match up, otherwise both card and drive may be damaged.
  3. Ensure that the link in the block of 3x5 pins furthest from the SIMM is not to the right, that is, it is either not present or set to the left.
  4. Run !PCConfig.
  5. Enter the drive characteristics in the window which appears. You may need to consult the drive datasheet or your supplier for the relevant information. Note that your version of DOS may restrict the sector size to 17 and the number of cylinders to less than 1024.

Specifying start up time

You may need to specify the option Start-up time for IDE drives if your drive is slower to start up than average. (And if you have a quick drive then you can probably reduce the default to save a bit of time). This gives the time in tenths of a second that the PC card waits on power up before trying to access the drive. This is because the drive only starts to spin up the first time !PC is started, and it cannot be used until it is up to speed. 

If this value is too low then you may see error messages such as Drive not working or No boot drive available before it boots, and it may not boot at all.

  • Go to the line in the !PCconfig window Startup time for IDE drives (x 0.1 sec).

    •  
  • Enter a revised value.

    • The value must be a number between 0 and 140, that is, between 0 and 14 seconds. The default value is 21, that is 2.1 seconds.

Fitting a drive activity light

It is possible to fit an LED to the PC Card via jumper J10. This allows you to set up a front-panel LED so that you can see when the drive is being accessed. Note that if you do this, the LED will always be on before !PC is run for the first time, and will only give a reliable reading when you are actually running !PC.

Aleph One Ltd. 25-27
 
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