At 04:21 PM 4/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
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.
Need RLL controller for the ST-238 and MFM for the ST-225. Sorry if that
was already abundantly obvious.
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 have docs for the WD cards. The 27X sounds (without looking) like an RLL
controller.
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.
That certainly will NOT work. The floppy cable is for floppy drives. Get a
MFM 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.
Wrong 34-pin cable. Also check the markings on the controllers and the
drives very carefully for the pin 1 identification. Perhaps all the solder
pads are round, except for one which is deliberately square, (that's pin 1)
or maybe it's silk screened on the board/drive.
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?
No, it's not too fast. Try the right cable and the Western Digital
controllers.
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preparing for war. --John F. Kennedy
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