Monthly Archives: February 2019

Reading From Void

Recently I came across the following question: What happens when software reads the registers of a non-existent IDE controller? That is, what happens when software reads for example ports in the 1F0h-1F7h/3F6h range (primary IDE channel) when there is no … Continue reading

Posted in BIOS, IDE, PC hardware | 10 Comments

Ancient NetWare OS/2 Requesters?

Quite a while ago there was a discussion on this site about NetWare support for OS/2 versions prior to 1.3. Finding reliable information is difficult, especially when one doesn’t know exactly what to look for. Spurred by the discovery of … Continue reading

Posted in NetWare, OS/2, PC history | 13 Comments

Historical ATA Standard Drafts

After some digging, I discovered that several old drafts of the original ATA standard (later known as ATA-1) have been out in the public all along, or at least for a very long time, cleverly hiding among hundreds of SCSI-related … Continue reading

Posted in IDE, PC history, Storage | 15 Comments

NetWare 3.12 vs. Large IDE Disks

Recently I had an occasion to find out why NetWare 3.12 using the shipped IDE driver (IDE.DSK) behaves, very, very strangely when let loose on disks bigger than about 500MB (a very foolish thing to even try). The driver loaded … Continue reading

Posted in Bugs, IDE, NetWare, PC history | 46 Comments