owenc@hpindwa.HP.COM (Owen Cheung) (02/20/90)
I am trying to buy a hard drive for my AT bridgeboard. I have tried a ESDI controller & drive, and it didn't work. I am look at 3.5" CONNER drive with a "AT TASK controller". I never heard of that type of controller before, but it comes with the drive and the salesman told me a lot of good thing about it. Have anybody try it before? Does it work with the AT bridgeboard? If not, what do you have (MFM, RLL, or SCSI)? I am primary looking at a 3.5" type of drive with 40M, what would you recommend? Just out of curosity. Anybody have any idea why my ESDI controller & drive didn't work? Isn't the AT bus suppose to 100% AT compatible? Anyone from Commodore have any clue? Owen
bear@bu-pub.bu.edu (Blair M. Burtan) (02/22/90)
>>>>> On 19 Feb 90 17:56:54 GMT, owenc@hpindwa.HP.COM (Owen Cheung) said: >> I am trying to buy a hard drive for my AT bridgeboard. I have tried a >> ESDI controller & drive, and it didn't work. I am look at 3.5" CONNER drive >> with a "AT TASK controller". I never heard of that type of controller >> before, but it comes with the drive and the salesman told me a lot of >> good thing about it. Have anybody try it before? Does it work with >> the AT bridgeboard? If not, what do you have (MFM, RLL, or SCSI)? I am >> primary looking at a 3.5" type of drive with 40M, what would you recommend? >> Just out of curosity. Anybody have any idea why my ESDI controller & drive >> didn't work? Isn't the AT bus suppose to 100% AT compatible? Anyone from >> Commodore have any clue? Let me tell you a little story about what happened to me in a similar situation over the weekend. I have an A1000 w/ a Sidecar. I had a hard drive on it. Miniscribe 3245 and a Western Digital controller. Worked great. Then I was fortunate enough to get a full-blown A2500/30 system via the edu discount. So, I decided to pop in the controller and drive so I could do PC work. The AT bridgeboard wouldn't boot with the controller in it. I checked everything. Setup, cables, etc. No soap. So, I figured that I needed an AT controller card. Shelled out the $200 for it. The system would recognize the controller, but not the disk. FDISK returned a very wierd partition table. FDISK won't delete partitions or fix the table. I determined that I needed to do a low level format of the disk. Ha Ha, I hear IBM chuckle, you need Advanced Diagnostics to do it. Well, I managed to pick up a program called SpeedStor. This does controller and disk diagnostics as well as low- level formatting and partitioning. This overrides the SETUP of the bridgeboard. Anyway, during formatting, you need to tell the program what type of drive you have. So, I told it I had a Miniscribe 3425. The table entries made sense. But the damn program doubled the number of sectors. As a result, I got a massive bad block table. I had to enter the parameters manually. Finally, everything worked out. The moral to this story? Make sure the left hand knows what the right hand is doing ;-) -- --------------------------- Signature Version 1.0 --------------------------- | bear@bu-pub.bu.edu enge05c@buacca.bu.edu | | "There are many perks in being the mother of a living god. | | Nice apartment, car, free parking." | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------