Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr> writes:

> On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 12:34:55AM +0200, Johan Ihren wrote:
> > This is an OLD machine (I just checked and the BIOS is called
> > PhoenixBIOS v1.03 and is from 1992). So the machine is perhaps not
> > pre-historic, but at least somewhat medieval. It has never heard of
> > APM, does no spinning down of disks, and by no stretch of my
> > imagination can I believe the IDE controller doing fancy things ;-)

> These old machines are the one who had enhanced IDE controllers
> (such as these ISA controllers with cache). Newest machines have
> more standardised things.  These controllers catch ATA commands and
> interpret them by themselve (for data caching, read-ahead, etc ...),
> and usually just punt on those they don't know (it's impossible to
> get an ATAPI device working with these, for example). They ususally
> implement the command set used by windows but nothing more :(

My wildest imagination apparently needed a reality upgrade. Ick.

I guess I should consider myself lucky that I managed to get it to
boot something useful at all, cross my fingers and leave it alone
running DHCP and DNS in a corner until it withers away (which was the
plan anyhow).

Thanks,

Johan Ihrén, <johani@pdc.kth.se>,
phone: +46 (8) 790 6844, Center for Parallel Computers, 
Royal Institute of Technology, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden