Alter Group - Universal ATA driver for Windows NT3.51/NT4/2000/XP
Overview
Who and why need this driver ? Let me tell you: it worth installing UniATA if vendor of your new motherboard
do not want to supply you with drivers for your old OS. Or vice versa, you have old motherboard and want to
install new Windows with it. Of course, it is possible to use standard (generic) drivers those most probably
supports this hardware. But what about performance ? You will have PIO mode with 0.5 - 3 Mb/sec transfer rate.
UniATA shall use DMA or UltraDMA and have up to 10 times better performance. There is still one common problem
with modern hard driver of more than 128 Gb capacity (also known as LBA-48 or BigLba). Old OSes do not support such
drives at all, new ones require latest Service Packs. UniATA has built-in support for large drives. And at last -
upgrade or downgrade of the motherboard. If you simply connect your harddisk to different motherboard, the driver
of the previous one shall not recognize new IDE controller. And the system shall not boot. You will have to connect
everything back, change IDE drivers to generic ones, reboot and reconnect hardware again, then change drivers
to new ones. You cannot even think about walking with bootable harddrive to some other computers. Or resign yourself
to have 0.5 - 3 Mb/sec transfer rate. Since UniATA supports
numerous IDE controllers and in addition is capable of driving
all standard (onboard primary/secondary) controllers, this problem also appears to be solved.
Below you can find more detailed and more technical feature list.
Features
DMA/UDMA support (up to ATA-133) on known and generic DMA on unknown controllers
LBA48 (large drives greater than 128Gb) support
SerialATA support (SATA, SATA-2)
NT3.51 (including i386 version), NT4, 2000, XP, 2003 support (may be 2005 - not tested)
support of contiguous set of modes UDMA0-UDMA6 (ATA-16/25/33/44/66/100/133)
Support of numerous IDE controllers and generic ATA/ATAPI
no reinstall required when migrating to different IDE controller or motherboard.
internal command queueing and optimized execution order of read/write requests
user-mode device management utility atactl.exe. You can change data transfer mode
(PIO/DMA/UDMA) on the fly.
tuning Read/Write cache, transfer modes and many other things via Registry settings
list of bad/unreliable blocks, to prevent driver from treating HDD but return error immediately (Nikolai Vorontsov).
Plans
Human-friendly setup tool
Full functional Serial ATA AHCI support
RAID support (mirror, stripping, mirror+stripping)
Hot swap for IDE devices under OSes prior w2k (Mike)
correct PNP (WDM) implementation for w2k and higher
SATA-splitters support
Win 9x/ME support (now we have separate build with some limitation, thanks to Xeno from www.msfn.org)
work with BIOS INT13 (Alexei Chipovalov)
emulation of MODE SENSE/MODE SELECT SCSI commands on IDE devices (HDD) for managing caching, standby mode, etc.
old MFM HDD support (KtP)
Download latest betas
October, 06, 2008 : Version 0.39j1 for WindowsNT/2K/XP (compiled release/debug version)
This is a more recent version of Alter's UniATA, he gave me it as troubleshooting version for Intel's ICH8/ICH9 SATA controllers and for some CD drives.
July, 04, 2008 : Version 0.39f for Windows9x (sources and compiled debug version)
his is a third-party version made by Xeno from www.msfn.org forum with experimental Windows9x support.
Attached Files
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driver_9x_39g1.rar 280.22KB
2079 downloads
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BusMaster_v39j1.rar 150.05KB
1748 downloads
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BusMaster_v39j1_Dbg.rar 400.31KB
1779 downloads
