Re: [Sheflug] Disk Drive Problem

["Craig Andrews" <nospam [at] fishbot.org.uk>]

I had a similar problem with my laptop hdd (which, although only 130Mb, had
1128 cylinders!! Far too many for the BIOS, anyhow). When using DOS/Win311,
I needed a HDD manager/booter which allowed the BIOS to see it.

Anyway, I configured the drive manually to those settings, even though it
reported wrong, and booted Minix (386sx20 w/ 2Mb, not good enough for Linux.
Still, process the same). I watched intently as the messages flashed up, and
found it reported hda as only having 786 cylinders, and different amounts of
heads/sectors than reported on top of the drive.

I put these new settings into the BIOS, and the correct size was reported.
The drive formatted properly, and Minix (and presumaby Linux if I had more
RAM) has worked without fault ever since.

Thanks to the ability of most (all) un*x kernels to detect their own HDD
settings, I have also found that all drives are reconfigured anyhow, and the
BIOS settings are only used by LILO.

Hope this helps?

Craig

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Wright <Ian [at] iw63.freeserve.co.uk>
To: Sheflug <sheflug [at] vuw.ac.nz>
Date: Tuesday, September 05, 2000 9:21 PM
Subject: [Sheflug] Disk Drive Problem


>Hi,
>
>I've got a problem with a couple of hard drives which I can't find an
>immediate solution to. I acquired a couple of old computers and decided to
>put linux on them so I could play with one as a server and the other for
>engineering machine control. However, in trying to install RH5.2, both hard
>drives have screwed up and I can't even seem to get them working again with
>windoze. The problem is that the computers are old 386/486's and the hard
>drives which are a Samsung WNR-31601A 1.6Gb and a Maxtor HD41-M 1.3Gb seen
>to have needed some kind of supplementary program to access their full
>potential. I've looked on the two company's sites but can only see drivers
>for windoze but I can't even seem to install these so that the motherboard
>BIOSs will recognise the drive types. I just get boot messages saying
>basically that the computer can't identify the drive. Can anyone offer any
>clues as to how I might salvage the situation please?
>
>Ian
>--
>Ian W. Wright
>Sheffield  UK
>
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