Re: What do you think, will connecting a ST-225 work (part 2)


"Rich" <notty@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7lkt84F3dnatdU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Some people were curious about the outcome of my efforts to run a vintage
ST-225 HD on my relatively modern (1998) motherboard (MS-6119), with an 8
bit controller card (WD1002A0WX1).

I'm working totally with DOS. All IDE set to "not intalled" in my system
BIOS. Floppy disk connected.

The procedure to follow is:

1 Low level format the drive using the programme that comes with the
controller card. This is effected by runing DEBUG, and at the prompt:
G=C800:5.

2 Partition the drive using FDISK

3 Hi level format the drive using FORMAT

Report:

I can low level format the drive, but I cannot create a partition with
FDISK.

This is the point I think where some (not all) are prevented from
installing
an old ST-225.

Running FDISK produces "Error Reading Fixed Disk". Running FDISK/STATUS
produces:

DISK DRV MBYTES FREE USAGE

1 20 20 %

When my PC starts up, the drive is interrogated, because I see the red LED
on the drive itself flash a few times.

If I enable IDE0 to boot from my regular hard drive, when the controller
card is in, the system promts me to put in a floppy boot disk. When the
card
is out, the system boots from my regular C:

I believe the ST-225 is using BIOS in the controller card.

I think that in some cases the problem can be caused by system BIOS not
getting along with the controller BIOS.

I don't know what further diagnosis or procedure I could do to psyche
out the problem. There may be no fix I realise, not even with a 16 bit
controller card.

Motherboard: http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/M-O/34347.htm

Controller card: http://artofhacking.com/th99/c/U-Z/20217.htm

P.S. I don't know if using FIXMBR would help. Probably not.

I reckon its going to be a struggle the older MFM HDD's had to be manually
configured
into the controller bios as the technology was not capable of reading the
drive bios (I remember spending ages searching for the spec for a very
uncommon and huge for the time 105mb Teac drive) have you got the bios
jumpers configured correctly it was a common issue prior plug and play to
get interrupt and address conflicts - still not half as awkward as the
integrated IO cards with parallel and and serial port jumpers

Derek
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/seagate/ST225-21MB-5-25-HH-MFM-ST412.html
http://www.artofhacking.com/th99/c/U-Z/21202.htm


.

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