Uncreative Labs

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

I had about 4 of these wierd cards but used them in half broken pentium machines that had nonfunctional onboard hard disk controllers years ago not really thinking about whether these had any value or usefullness beyond what I was using them for.

Basically this is a 16bit buffered ISA card that automatically detect up to 4 floppies and 4 IDE hard drives. The card automatically pops up its own bios at boot similar to a SCSI card, you can format and configure it at post and it automatically detects hard drives up to 8gb and can format DOS 16bit drives up to 8gb as ONE partition. It works on anything with a 16bit ISA slot and also can work on machines with bad bios's or Bad IDE controllers.

I am curious if these have any value or novelty as I have seen catweisel and other goofy cards go VERY high for seemingly no reason. They would be usefull for someone but anymore I don't have much use as it isn't 8 bit

Cheers
Ryan

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

whats the manufactuer and model?

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

I lied, it appears the one I have left is only a 2 hard drive variety but it still supports 4 floppies. It is a GSI model 21 1533-21-10

I used to have the manuals for these, this paticular card has a connector for a ribbon cable that would go to a local bus connector, making it a little quicker if you have the option card for it.

Strange beasty but a good way of bypassing the need for special hd utilities on old machines.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

I have a card made GSI sort of like that. And did you say this card can some how make a 8gb partion? If so what OS will it work with?

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

2we used these in the 8088 era,
the dtk card was returned as it would not format both 720 and 1.44 floppies with the proper size ( bytes)
the other cards of variousa brands all worked.
the nicest was the IOS-2. it was a 2 floppy/clock/i-o card in a 4" square 8 bit card.
it came up at bootup like modern pentium systems
( in an xt) setting the floppy drives and the clock.

I had a nutcase customer who would plug things together with gender changers (serial to parallel)
and also did not believe in turning power off.
he also thought you could keep adding cards and ports if there were enough slots.

it was a big argument NOT to set up an audio cassete tape backup ( no irq's left) 20m capacity.

he blew out my next-to-last ios-2 card and insisted it was MY FAULT. I gridginly gave him my last card bit searched and found another one at a computer
show, I still have it and the other special ( not odd) cards stored away.
I never got into xt ide . and keep mfm drives if i ever set up anothe rolder system
by the color of the box.show. Lucky

Posted: Sat Feb 24, 2007 5:17 pm

I have one ISA With primary and secondary IDE on a 386 board but I think it is now defect because it cannot find floppy and does not boot all the way.
(it is years since I messed with it).

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

since where talking about ide controller cards, I bought this 16bit ISA card last year called the EIDEMAX II it has two onboard ide port witch can be set to either primary, secondery, tertiary,and quanternary. It also has built in bios that can idetify drive up 128gb on any ide port on the system! this particular card has been actining wierd because when I first start the computer with the card in it, the system say 101 rom error or something like that. when I press ctrl+alt+del the card would work fine. culd I have a conflict or somthing?

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

According to the manual you can partition a standard 8gb in one partition using the onboard utility for Dos 5/6 I often wondered what would happen and if the drive would be transferable out of the machine after doing that, must be a similar cludge to the way Dos 3 could go past 32mb I guess.

Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:22 am

wdegroot wrote:

the nicest was the IOS-2. it was a 2 floppy/clock/i-o card in a 4" square 8 bit card. it came up at bootup like modern pentium systems
( in an xt) setting the floppy drives and the clock.

Was this the full name of the card? Was there a brand etc?

Do you by chance have one that you may like to part with?

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

386er wrote:

I have a card made GSI sort of like that. And did you say this card can some how make a 8gb partion? If so what OS will it work with?

Strangely enough it claims it will make a single dos compatible 8gb partition (one drive letter) I will have to get a machine setup to test it in.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

did it need a utility? Mabey i'll dig my old GSI card out and do some experimenting.... right now its under a 3-4 feet pile of ISA cards
if i find the little guy, i'll post some pics.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

The card had its own bios and also had its own formatting utility for hard drives, strange beast but very usefull if you have a 286/386/486 that doesn't want to use a normal hd or has a blown controller