jwbirdsa@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (James Webster Birdsall) (03/08/89)
I have an old 10 Meg Plus Hardcard in my PC XT. I recently acquired a Seagate 238R with WD controller 1002A-27X. They worked fine for a while; then I got persistent write errors on the Seagate when I tried to put more than 10 megs on it. Following a call to technical support, I did a low-level format and, lo and behold, the Seagate only formatted to 305 cylinders (approx 10 megs)! Today, as a last desperate maneuver, I removed the Hardcard and tried the low-level format again. 939 cylinders, this time. The problem appears to be that the system gets confused between the two drives. So I divided the Seagate into a bunch of logical drives 10 megs or less apiece. Everything seemed to be working fine; however, when I boot from the Seagate, I only get 305 cylinders again! It will only recognize two of the four logical drives and will only write to one of them -- the other shows the same write error as I had originally. As long as I boot from the floppy, everything works fine. All the logical drives are alive and well. Anybody have any idea what difference booting from the floppy makes? Or any other suggestions? [Technical details: the Seagate is drive c: (and e:, f:, g:); the Hardcard is drive d:. I cannot use the Hardcard as the first HD and the Seagate as the second because then I get ROM overlap, which makes my machine very unhappy. I have also tried setting both as the first drive and setting both as the second drive (hey, I was running out of ideas) -- one of these stunts produced ROM overlap again, the other produced a controller error (1701). The WD controller is RLL, as is the controller built in to the Hardcard.] Thanks a lot... -- James W. Birdsall jwbirdsa@phoenix.Princeton.EDU jwbirdsa@pucc.BITNET ...allegra!princeton!phoenix!jwbirdsa Compu$erve: 71261,1731 "For it is the doom of men that they forget." -- Merlin