acs@ecsvax.UUCP (04/02/87)
Has anyone had any experiences using the seagate st4051 with Western Digital WX1 controller on the AT&T 6300. I am haveng trouble configuring the drive as a 30mg drive C and 10mg drive D. I was able to get it going as a 20mg dr C and 20mg dr D, but now that is no longer working either. Specifically, after a low level format I run FDISK. FDISK fixes the partition for me. Next I do the normal format c:/s. When this is finished, my machine locks up when I try to boot. Also, running chkdsk c: immediately after the format c:/s is finished reveals that I have X number of lost clusters in X number of chains. The X's here vary each time I format. Note that chkdsk reports these errors on both c and d immediately after the drives have been formatted. Occasionally, I get a non-DOS partition on both drive c and d according to FDISK. When this happens, I have to go through the whole process again - low level, fdisk and format. Has anyone ever seen hard disks behave this way? Also, if the drive has an excessive amount of bad sectors, what happens? Does DOS give an error? Does it go on like nothing is wrong? The only thing I can do consistently is the low level format of the drive - I get no error doing this. I have tried all this with DOS 2.1 and 3.1 (AT&T), on 6300's with 1.0, 1.1 and 1.21 ROMs installed. Anyone have any ideas? Help save me from the funny farm. Wayne Fee, Appalachian State Univ
wtm@neoucom.UUCP (04/05/87)
Large capacity disk drives can often be problematic on MSDOS machines. The 4051 and WX-1 should probably work on the 6300. I suppose you could run into some problems with older BIOS versions, if you try to use the "internal" setting of the DIP switch. Set the DIP switch to "external" to ensure that the BIOS ROM on the WX-1 gets used. I can't remember now if the ST-4051 requires write precompensation. Not using precomp where required could cause flaky operation. The precomp is used to boost write current on inner tracks. The 4051 is a "type 11" disk drive. Your WX-1 should be jumpered for this. Call WD to get info about the jumpers. To save a lot of pain, get the program, SPEEDSTOR, which makes the installation of your drive virtually automatic. SPEEDSTOR will also partition your drive into two logical units. SPEEDSTOR likes to set the 4051 up as 20/20 Meg rather than 30/10. I was just happy to get it up and running, so I didn't bother to question SPEEDSTOR's wisdom. Bill Mayhew Division of Basic Medical Sciences Northeastern Ohio Universities' College of Medicine Rootstown, OH 44272 USA phone: 216-325-2511 (wtm@neoucom.UUCP ...!cbatt!neoucom!wtm)