30 Jul
2003
30 Jul
'03
8:02 a.m.
On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 vance(a)neurotica.com wrote:
On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Doc wrote:
So there isn't any reliable way of knowing the drive geometry on older
IDE drives? Another reason for me to not use IDE whenever possible. I
think the only machine I have that has IDE in it is my Powerbook.
The most reliably way seems to be to always allow the system to
auto-detect the drive's settings. Some enhanced or non-standard ATA
controllers will still sometimes allocate space on the drive in a
nonstandard way, so you still have to watch those. Of course this won't
help for an old drive that someone is trying to recover data from...
-Toth
True, and
sometimes whats printed on the drive does not match what
the drive reports to the BIOS. Of course, sometimes people would use
settings from a book of hard drive settings, especially when the
drive was already installed. The settings printed in such a book
don't always match whats printed on the drive or what the drive
reports to the BIOS.
Not only that, but Quantum was the worst about mislabelling drives.
I've seen several sub-1GB Quantum IDE drives with SCSI jumper settings
on the label, or vice versa, and many with the wrong size and
geometry.