J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Ken Blake
writes:
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 13:42:44 -0600, Paul in Houston TX
wrote:

wrote:
Got 16 bit stuff ?

Create a virtual machine running an older version of Windows
( e.g. XP ) in memory. See Oracle VirtualBox. Very easy, handy and
quick.

I've got 28 great apps written in QuickBasic v4.5, and 14 in Windows
Visual Basic v3 .

I know there is a provision for running things in a compatibility mode
for older versions of Windows, but I could never get it to work.

In the virtual machine I have a desktop with 42 icons. Comes right up
and all apps work great.

Would be nice to have an app to convert all to VB6 which I use
extensively for all ny contenporary stuff.

Wish it would allow running an IDE drive on a SATA only machine.



Buy an IDE adapter card. They start around $25 on Amazon.com.

Alternatively buy an USB IDE enclosure for external drives and mount
the IDE drive in it. They start around $20.

Or a dock; I have one that has both an (E)IDE and a SATA slot. (When I
bought it, I rather liked the idea that it could also, in theory,
duplicate a drive without being connected to a computer at all; it only
occurred to me subsequently that it could - obviously! - only copy IDE
to SATA, or maybe vice versa. Doesn't _matter_, as I've never actually
wanted to duplicate a drive.)

Or a "cable" - basically the guts of a USB housing without the housing,
and built into the connectors of a cable (despite often being sold as a
cable or lead, there _is_ electronics in there).

I think the OP did say - in part that has been snipped - that he had
tried SATA/IDE adapter hardware of some sort though.

The SATA to IDE or IDE to SATA should be transparent.
Because the very first SATA hard drives, used an IDE to SATA
chip and were "clipped" at 100MB/sec because of the presence
of that chip.

The USB to SATA or USB to IDE require a "USB Mass Storage"
approach, something from a booting perspective that is only
available from around 2005 onward. And usually, on the
Southbridge USB ports. If you had a Southbridge USB1.1 and
a NEC USB2 on a year 2006 motherboard, the NEC would not
offer boot. However, in 2019, you usually see boot extended
to the add-on chips. So at least some add-on chip makers
must be providing a code module for contributing to boot
and INT 0x13 disk reading. Maybe the UEFI has made this
easier (standardized) somehow.

In the legacy BIOS, USB booting was always termed "emulation"
and a USB floppy would be a "1.44MB hard drive", a 250MB ZIP
would be a "250MB hard drive". When my first computer would
not boot a DVD, it was because there was an emulation
for a "700MB hard drive" but nothing for a "4.7GB hard drive".
The terminology suggests the base booting mechanism thought
there was just one type of media to deal with, and a layer
underneath was screwing around to make that possible. It
was, in a sense, "not a plugin architecture". I would expect
UEFI to be a bit more of a plugin thing, because UEFI is
almost like an OS of sorts.

Both legacy BIOS and UEFI have their own "file system"
concepts - the legacy BIOS, you could see the "modules" if
you used a BIOS tool, and people hacking BIOS would change
out modules (the Silicon Image SIL3112 for example), and
create a new BIOS flash image. So it's a file system of
sorts. But not every aspect of legacy BIOS was as modular
and extensible as it should have been.

Paul