Uses for part working Iyonix PC's

Apart from dying totally one of the common Iyonix Motherboard faults is the hard drive interface dying or being intermittently unreliable. The unreliability is often only on booting with no drive found, rebooting several times sometimes works and drive access is then fine until the next reboot. (I have seen a dodgy PSU result in this symptom but changing the PSU only seems to fix it in a minority of cases)

So what uses could an Iyonix without a working IDE drive be put to?

I think it can be set to boot over the network or a Filecore formatted USB drive though I’ve not got round to trying it myself.

n.b. I have some Iyonix motherboards that had failed Castle’s QA. If anyone is interested in them for spares/repair I’m open to offers.

It would be really cool to have drivers for S-ATA PCI controllers for the IYONIX. I think there are/were combi PCI cards available with the usual Silicon Image chipset providing S-ATA and PATA and having the same NEC USB2 chipset on it than the original IYONIX USB card. So you wouldn’t even lose a PCI slot. Not that there is much available to put in…

USB booting should be possible (but maybe a bit finicky on older OS versions – there were some performance issues in the USB stack and FileCore which could make USB drives very slow)

SATA via AHCI PCI cards should in theory be simple, since we’ve now got two competing AHCI driver implementations. Although there is the slight wrinkle that ADFS 4 hasn’t had the IDE/floppy code ported over from ADFS 3 yet, so a bit more work is needed there if you want the ADFS flavour of SATA while still retaining IDE/floppy support.