original date 09/18/1991 Message #29182 Reply To: #28923 To CLYDE MCMURDY 09-17-91 0:36am From DAVE BROCK Subject (R)3RD AT DRIVE --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am curently running a 3rd hard disk (2nd controller card) on my 286 12MHZ turbo. I have been using it for several months now and have had no problems yet. 1) Get a hard drive controller with on-board bios that can be readdressed to CA00:0000, such as the Western Digital WDXTGEN2. Even though there is no ROM at C800:0000 in an AT, there seems to be a conflict in addressing an additional controller at that location. 2) Tell SETUP that you have no hard drives installed. Boot on an external floppy that you have prepared with DEBUG, FDISK, and FORMAT copied. You'll need them to do a low-level format on the 3rd drive (if it has to be done) FDISK also will be needed if you haven't partitioned the drive, and FORMAT if you haven't high level formatted it. 3) Now that the 3rd drive has been formatted to the 2nd hard disk controller, reboot the system and tell SETUP that you have the hard disks installed that are on the AT hard disk controller card. If all goes well, you should now find the 3rd hard drive accessible as the next physical drive. I have been unable to get this arrangement to work on ANYTHING BUT MSDOS 5.0. If you have DOS 4.01 or 3.3, you probably won't get the additional drive recognized. CAUTION!!!! Before you boot up and tell SETUP that you have no hard drives (Step 1), I would extract the control and data cables from the AT's hard disk controller card, just so there's NO WAY you can accidentally format your original drives. Just be sure to reconnect the cables before you tell SETUP the drives are present (don't connect or disconnect any cable with power on, of course). Good luck!