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Author Topic: Idefix Four Drive Ide Adaptor  (Read 46 times)

mr_greedy

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Idefix Four Drive Ide Adaptor
« on: September 18, 2004, 09:04:00 PM »
i have seen the xtender solution for putting in more than one ide drive into an xbox.
basically it turns off the power to a disk and turns on another.

but the problem is that you cant access more than one drive at a time.

what about using a solution like in the amiga computers.
the a1200 and a600 only had one ide port so using a logic circut and some diodes allowed you to gain access to up to four drives.

by making a custom driver for the ide interface which selected the different drives using software commands that were seamless to the system.

i know nothing about the xbox hardware and if it is capable of doing but the circuit is really simple.

would this be just a bios update to get this to work.

i beleve there is source code and diagrams on aminet for this.

could this be a possibility on the xbox?
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Chicken Scratch Boy

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Idefix Four Drive Ide Adaptor
« Reply #1 on: September 18, 2004, 09:10:00 PM »
i dont know but you'd need to have the driver's hacked into the bios

then you'd need a way to control the cirucit from the box, so you'd need to have a gen 4-esque chip with a spi/paralel(sic) port on it with some specialized code to control your switching dealie

i think that having more then 1 hdd seems a bit unessesary but i think that the work could be minimized if you just settled for 2 and just hacked another hdd into the bios that has 1 big partition on it....
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mr_greedy

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Idefix Four Drive Ide Adaptor
« Reply #2 on: September 18, 2004, 09:26:00 PM »
on the amiga the driver was loaded in the startup sequence and was made reset resident (the computer restarted its self) and patched scsi.device.
this allow lba support and access to the other drives there was no software to switch the drives over if you issued a command or tried to gain access to  it mould open up the device.
from memory it had a small buffer to speed things up it basically drove a pin low to access the other two drives.
does the disk control chip allow you access to such low level access?
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EvilWays

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Idefix Four Drive Ide Adaptor
« Reply #3 on: September 25, 2004, 10:39:00 PM »
The Amiga logic circuit idea has already been shot down on Xbox-Linux (with explanation as to why it wouldn't work).

This post has been edited by EvilWays: Sep 26 2004, 05:42 AM
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