gottloeb@eel.dsd.trw.com (Jeffery R. Gottloeb) (06/22/91)
In article <objtch.669853362@extro> objtch@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Peter Goodall) writes: >My father has an AST Premium 386/c which has had a SWIFT 94354-125 drive >installed by the dealer recently. I believe (and Nortons Utilities 5.0) >that they have set up the drive incorrectly. > >Their set-up was 1072 cylinders 9 heads and 29 sectors/track. > >I think that they have 2 too many heads. The system runs but has occaisional >trouble with files. Nortons refuses to have anything to do with it. > >There seem to be two sub-models of the drive, one ESDI and one IDE. >Is this true? and how do I distinguish between them. > >Why don't they put two different model numbers on them? > > >Peter Goodall The SWIFT family of disk drives are made by Seagate Technology (1-800-468-3472). They have a bulletin board system that provides technical information for downloading (1-408-438-8771) including spec sheets and installation guides. One program that can be downloaded is FINDTYPE. This program will give the appropriate BIOS drive type or compute the best approximation. When I ran FINDTYPE, it did not recognize 94354-125 but did recognize 94354-126 (aka ST1126a) as having 111.4 Mb formatted. If this is your drive then FINDTYPE recommended using a custom BIOS drive type with 469 cyls, 16 heads, 29 sectors/track, landing zone of 469, and precomp of -1. While the drive's geometry is actually 1072 cyl., 7 heads, 29 sec/tk., DOS can not handle more than 1023 cylinders. Thus these drives have the ability to mimic various drive geometries. (Don't ask me how. I don't know.) Do not low-level reformat the drive after changing the BIOS description. Use the DOS FORMAT command instead. A low-level format wipes out the device defect map and necessary controller information (cylinder and head skew factors) according to Seagate and you will need special software to restore this information. I could only find an IDE and an SCSI version (94351-126, ST1126n) in Seagate's spec sheets. Hope this helps. Jeff Gottloeb gottloeb@r3nosve.dsd.trw.com