wlr@beach.cis.ufl.edu (William Ricker) (10/15/89)
I've found that this drive has 1170 cylinders and fdisk doesn't seem to like it. So currently I've set the number of cylinders to 1024, which means I'm only getting 62 of the 71 meg of the drive :<<<. I'm also really disappointed at the performance. My previous drive was a Seagate 4051 39ms drive. This drive was advertised as a 22ms (many other adds claimed it to be 17/18ms) drive, but the performance I'm getting seems to be twice as slow as my old drive :(((. Is this drive really such a pig? I believe the drive parameters are 1170 cylinders, 7 heads, 1170 landing zone, -1 write precomp. Can any one help me please? Thanks in advance bill -- Bill Ricker wlr@vlsi2.ee.ufl.edu 141 Turkey Creek wlr@beach.cis.ufl.edu Alachua, FL 32615 bill%ricker.UUCP@ufl.edu (904) 462-3377 gatech!uflorida!ricker!bill
wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) (10/15/89)
In article <21056@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> wlr@beach.cis.ufl.edu () writes: |I've found that this drive has 1170 cylinders and fdisk doesn't seem |to like it. So currently I've set the number of cylinders to 1024, which Disk Manager, from OnTrack systems (?), has a BIOS extender program that makes the computer recognize drives with >1024 cylinders. A copy of this program is often distributed with disks that need it. You might try asking the people you bought the drive from if you can get a copy of Disk Manager. BTW, I just got a bunch of ST251-1's with DM v4.0 .. some nice more-user-friendlyness than the other versions, esp. w.r.t. bad tracks. (For an end user, going through an ugly procedure to enter bad tracks isn't so bad, because they only have to do it once or twice. For a computer installer, who does it several times a day, these additions are greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ontrack, wherever you are! :-) Bill -- Bitnet: wcf@psuhcx.bitnet Bill Fenner | aaaaaaaaa Internet: wcf@hcx.psu.edu | r UUCP: {gatech,rutgers}!psuvax1!psuhcx!wcf | g Fido: Sysop at 1:129/87 (814/238 9633) \hogbbs!wcf | h
zech@leadsv.UUCP (Bill Zech) (10/17/89)
In article <1700@psuhcx.psu.edu>, wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) writes: > In article <21056@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> wlr@beach.cis.ufl.edu () writes: > |I've found that this drive has 1170 cylinders and fdisk doesn't seem > |to like it. So currently I've set the number of cylinders to 1024, which > > Disk Manager, from OnTrack systems (?), has a BIOS extender program that makes > the computer recognize drives with >1024 cylinders. A copy of this program is > often distributed with disks that need it. You might try asking the people > you bought the drive from if you can get a copy of Disk Manager. > I bought the same disk drive and originally used DM 4.0. I soon chucked the Disk Manager code and settled for 1024 cyls because DM and Windows/386 are apparently not compatible. My system worked fine all the time except while running Windows/386 v2.11. Then I would gets lots of spurious disk errors, like drive not ready, even errors on non-existent drives. I then switched to MS-DOS 4.01, made one large partition, and have had no problems whatever. As far as speed goes, it seems pretty fast to me. Are you sure you formatted for 1:1 interleave? My ROM disk test in the AMI bios gives it about 500 KB/S. Not lightning fast, but right up there. -Bill