Apologies if I implied your code would do such a silly thing!  All I
wanted to do was provide what I hoped would be an experience not too
far off track in case someone might benefit from my bad luck and wasted
time (and be able to avoid what is likely a rare case these days).

The result of the original Win/95 install was a "permanent" loss of my
secondary channel, regardless of what OS I booted afterward.  NetBSD did
not see the channel either after the Win/95 "install event."

I think the Win/95 behavior is somehow related to Plug-n-Play - but I'm
not sure.  This is what the Dell support folks told me (i.e. that Win/95
had disabled the secondary channel - I expect it is by accident - their
code likely has this side-effect rather than the explicit disabling).

-- Ken

| From bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr Thu Dec  3 08:40:04 1998
|
| > I doubt it is a lot of use, but I had the same sort of event happen on
| > a 440FX based system with "Intel 82371SB PCI-to-ISA Bridge (PIIX3) etc."
| > and I was installing an original Win/95 release onto the box. The secondary
| > channel vanished (and the CD-ROM attached to it!).  After getting some help
| > it was explained to me that there is a bug in the original Win/95 that
| > causes it to disable to secondary channel in the BIOS (because it cannot
| > recognize the chip-set I think). I had to go to the "erase NVRAM" method
| > to recover the secondary channel (because the Dell box didn't let you
| > re-enable it via the BIOS SetUp screen).  Win/95 needed a patch or upgrade
| > to not cause this lossage on every boot.
| 
| My driver will never write anything to the BIOS, so that's not the
| problem (it's a bug in pciide I hopefully just fixed) What a strange idea
| anyway! why should an OS belives it knows better the hardware than the
| machine's firmware, and update the BIOS settings by it own ?
| And there's still guys to buy these softwares ... :(
| 
| --
| Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
| --