4 Apr
2005
4 Apr
'05
5:23 p.m.
Well, I read through the digest replies and don't agree with all of them
... so :):
Re: the floppy cable. The twist on a HD cable is closer to the edge than
the floppy cable. It is obvious if you hold the two of them together
which is which. The floppy twist starts at pin 10 while the HD twist
starts about pin 6 or so (don't have one in front of me.) A floppy cable
will work okay but *don't* use the end with the twist!
Make sure the data cable is connected to the correct connector if the
card supports two drives (IIRC one 40 pin connector and two 20 pin
connectors.)
A terminator is also required at the last drive in the chain. Assuming
you are using just one drive, not having the terminator installed would
probably cause the drive not to work properly.
If you are using a HD that originally had a twist, the jumper select
will most likely be set to drive 1. Using a straight cable will cause
the drive to appear as drive D instead of C ... I don't remember what
problems that will cause. So if using a straight cable, make sure the
drive select is at 0 (of 0-3) or 1 (of 1-4).
If you are using an 8-bit card with the bios enabled, make sure in the
386 setup that there is NO HD installed (the bios will take care of it.)
If you have the bios disabled, then go ahead and set the 386 HD setup to
Type 2 or 4? (can't remember, 615 cyl, 4 heads, 17 sectors) but you
*will* have to do a low level format to get the drive to work.
If you are trying to save files on the HD AND it was installed with an
8-bit controller, you don't have any choices but to use the 8-bit card
bios to access the data AND an identical controller to the one that was
used to low level format the drive. Fred can probably comment on whether
it has to be the same type of controller, or the same controller for
this to work. If you have any idea of what the original machine it came
out of was, that would help :).
Finally, the clicking you hear on the drive is not a good sign. I would
power up the drive with no cables connected (except of course the power
cable) and if the clicking still continues, the drive is probably bad.
If it is important enough, you could also send the drive to a data
recovery service and leave it to them to deal with it.
Marvin
P.S. - I think this is an example where top posting makes everything a
lot easier to follow :)!
OK, I posted about this a few weeks ago and now I have
some more
information.
The drives in question are a ST-225 20MB (615/4/17) that came out of an
XT (so would have been using a 8-bit controller) and a ST-238R 30MB
(615/4/26) of unknown origin.
I don't have or even know what the original controllers were, the
machines were gutted/given away years ago by the owners.
I have a 386 testbed which I'm using, and plan to laplink the files over
to another machine once they are accessible.
The only card in the 386 is a VGA card. Turbo is off.
I have the following controllers:
- WD1002A-27X 8-bit RLL
- Adaptec ACB-2370A S2 16-bit RLL/floppy
- WD1002SV-SR2 16-bit RLL/floppy
- Everex EV-346 16-bit MFM/floppy
I also have two Miniscribe 8438 30MB RLL drives. However, they were
used with the 27X, which means the geometry is ambiguous depending on
how the jumpers were set when it was formatted.
Now, I'm either doing something wrong or all these drives are dead.
I am using a floppy cable with a twist in it and a 20-pin data cable.
All of the drives spin up (the Miniscribes needed a little coaxing) and
sound "healthy" as they dance their little self-test jigs. Here's where
the trouble starts.
I tried the ST-238R with all three of the RLL controllers. With the 27X
and with no hard drive entered in the NVRAM setup, since the BIOS can't
be disabled, it runs the BIOS, which can't figure out what's going on
and returns a 1701 POST code.
With both of the 16-bit RLL controllers, 615/4/26 entered in the NVRAM
and the controller BIOS disabled, the drive makes a repetitive seeking
sound like an ECC retry about twice a second, until eventually the BIOS
gives up and returns Drive C: failure. What this seems to indicate to
me is that the drive was formatted with different geometry, or the
tracks have drifted so bad it can't get its bearings.
I also tried the Miniscribe drives with the 27X for kicks. Everything
sounds normal, including the long growl that I remember that
drive/controller combo doing during POST. But, a 1701 is returned,
which isn't normal - this drive *used* to work with this exact
controller.
The only MFM controller I have is the Everex, so I tried the ST-225 with
that one, entering 615/4/17 in the NVRAM and disabling its BIOS.
Unfortunately, I get mostly the same behavior as with the ST-238R;
except that with this drive, the retry clicks are about a second or two
apart. Eventually the BIOS gives up anyway.
I'm fresh out of ideas at this point. Maybe I have a bad cable? Do I
need to find the exact controller the drives were paired with - what
were the most common ones for each drive? Is the 386 the problem, too
fast for these cards?
--
Ryan Underwood, <nemesis at icequake.net>