how can I activate bus master mode on Mb pcchips M558?

BIOS update, EIDE card, or overlay software? (FAQ Hard disk recognition)
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pode1
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I have bought a quantum fireball lct 20 20 hard disk in argentine. (of course, where else, I'm not here as a tourist :-). It doesn't came with manual or driver of any kind. In the maxtor's site there is 3 files that are not very useful. I want to know how do I activate the bus master feature on the mainboard. I understand that the chipset or the bios must support it. Am I right?
The IRQ for the ide driver assigned by windows is 14. Is that ok? Could I improve perfomance lowering it?
My motherboard is a Pc-chips "elpina" M558 model. This board seem not have socket for caché upgrade. Also, the sandra 2000 test hardware program shows that the lack of caché reduces perfomance . . . and indicates that the board just has 32 K of this kind of memory.
My bios Id string is 51-0830-01437-00111111-071595-ut801x.
Please answer to me. Don't leave me with this . . . Pode1.
NickS
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Hi pode1.
There is a forum specially for PC-Chips at PC-Chips Lottery although some of the experts there also post here. Take a look there.

Lowering the IRQ does not make any difference to performance.


The M558 (see http://www.pcchips.com.tw/M558.html) may have a slot for Cache-on-a-stick (COAST) but the picture shows the L2 cache chips bottom right, should be 256K or 512K - if 512K I guess the COAST socket may not be fitted. The 32K cache will be your CPU cache; some boards were fitted with dummy cache chips, so it may be worth running Ray Van Tassel's "cachechk" from a DOS boot diskette if your Sandra show no Level 2 cache.

"Onboard PCI IDE interface with two connectors, suppports four IDE devices in 2 channels and the PCI IDE Controller, supports PIO Mode 0 to Mode 4 at maximum transfer rate of 16.67MB/s" is what it says, so looks like no DMA.
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Rainbow
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The M558 and M559 boards have the same chipset - they don't support IDE DMA at all.
At work, we have one M559 - I tried CCT386 and the graph showed that there's no cache - although that cache chips were there and they were not fake. After a BIOS upgrade, the cache started to work - it helped a bit but not very much...
Patched and tested BIOSes are at http://wims.rainbow-software.org
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