C.3. Plug and Play Devices and Non-Plug and Play Operating Systems

Plug and Play ISA devices may be used with non-Plug and Play operating systems by adding Plug and Play code to the appropriate driver. For non-boot devices, the devices will remain inactive until their specific driver is loaded. The driver will query all Plug and Play ISA cards in a system and find out which resources are in use. The driver will then configure the card to a location it believes to be conflict free and save this configuration. In this way, all Plug and Play ISA cards are configured and operate in an environment that is better than the environment today.

For boot devices in operating system environments that do not support Plug and Play, configuration will rely on boot configuration done by the user as well as Plug and Play configuration performed by the device driver. Boot devices must be configured by either manually setting options or running a setup utility to configure the device.