What a peculiar setup!
He, he! Yup, it is quite a hack, but it solves a few problems for me. First of all, the BIOS on the A2286 bridgeboard doesn't have an autodetect/custom parameters (cylinders, heads, sectors) setting for hard drives (AFAIK the A2386 does have this). It has the 47 preset values which ranges from about 10MB to 120MB. If you put in a drive that doesn't match the preset values exactly, the BIOS won't recognise it and you can't use the drive. Needless to say, finding drives these days that match one of those preset values is not easy.
The XTIDE Universal BIOS is a BIOS written by some guys that developed an IDE controller for XT PCs. Here's the link:
http://code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/ It gives old PCs a modern IDE BIOS that can autodetect the HDD, boot off the Primary, Secondary or Tertiary IDE controller and has a boot menu if you have multiple IDE drives with different OS's on each
. It does have an 8GB size limit on the drive though. You can still connect a bigger drive, but only 8GB will be accessible. 8GB is more than I'll ever use on my A2286, so this is perfect.
The problem is that you have to burn the XTIDE BIOS into an EPROM and then get the PC to read that EPROM. The main reason why I got the A2286 was to use a PC ISA network card and hook it up to the A2000 using Etherbridge. The ISA network card has a boot rom socket on it, so this where the XTIDE BIOS EPROM was inserted, in order for the PC to read it.
The IDE controller on the SB16 is a standard ISA IDE controller, setup as the Secondary controller. It can't be jumpered to be the Primary controller without doing some hardware hacks on the board itself. This is the reason why you couldn't boot a hard drive off the SB16 back in the day, as most PC BIOSes could only boot off the Primary controller. The XTIDE BIOS allows booting off a Secondary controller, so I could save an ISA slot on the A2000, using the SB16's IDE controller instead of a separate multi I/O card for the IDE controller. The third ISA slot has a VGA card in it, so they're all occupied.
FAT 16 does allow 4GB partitions as Freqmax pointed out, but I partitioned the HDD (an 8GB Compact Flash card) into 2 x 2GB partitions. I know 4GB is not being used, but I doubt I'll ever use that much space on the A2286. I've installed MS-DOS 6.22 and Etherbridge on the first partition and a bunch of 286 era games on the second partition. It's great being able to play Prince of Persia in VGA with sound on the A2286 with decent speed from the IDE controller.
I'll set up a new thread on how to do all of this if anyone's interested as I've already hijacked Xanxi's thread with this ramble.
