This README file of IDE286.ZIP accompanies IDE.OBJ and IDE.DSK for
NetWare v2.X. The following files are included for this revision:

IDE OBJ 5705 8-09-91 11:39a
IDE DSK 963 8-12-91 9:24a

Installation Instructions:

1) (NetWare v2.2) Copy the IDE.DSK to the SYSTEM-1 diskette
(NetWare v2.1x) Copy the IDE.DSK to the AUXGEN diskette

2) (NetWare v2.x) Copy the IDE.OBJ to the DSK_DRV_001 diskette.

3) (NetWare v2.2) Run INSTALL
(NetWare v2.1x) Run NETGEN

Notes:

The IDE.OBJ file is a NetWare 2.x disk driver which makes it
possible to use IDE/ATA type disk drives with file servers using
the IDE/ATA interface. The new IDE disk driver is very similar to
the old Netware ISA disk driver. However, one major difference
must be noted.

The ISA disk driver gets the drive descriptions from a table
pointed to by Interrupt 41. This table contains a list of disk
drives used with the old AT type machines. However, not all disk
drives are listed in the table and these tables vary with different
BIOS applications.

The IDE disk driver was designed to eliminate this problem. The
IDE disk driver does not get the drive description from a table.
It gets the drive descriptions directly from the disk drives at
initialization time.

When using the IDE disk driver, the following limitations must be
observed:

* Non-Dedicated NetWare will not work properly on IBM
Model 35 or IBM Model 40 machines. Data read
from, or written to floppy disks will be
corrupted. This problem will be corrected in the
future.

* The drive type number reported by the INSTALL
program is generated by the IDE disk driver at
initialization time and is useful only to the
NetWare operating system.

* The IDE disk driver will not work with ISA bus
controllers (i.e. ST506 and ESDI). The IDE/ATA,
ST506, and ESDI interfaces look similar to the
system software, but are handled differently by the
drivers.

* IDE/ATA, ST506, and ESDI hardware is not
interchangeable.

* The IDE disk driver supports multiple disk drives
of the same or different types.


Note: Although the ISA disk driver appears to work with IDE/ATA
disk drives, it will not handle errors on these drives correctly.