chinn@butler.UUCP (David Chinn) (07/29/86)
We are having trouble with a hard disk we bought for one of
our pc's a little while ago.
It seems that every so once in a while, (more often than to
be just annoying) we have a great deal of reading the hard disk.
Running a Norton disk test will sometimes turn up four or
five bad clusters, but will very seldom show the same bad sectors
(or any bad clusters at all) when run a second time.
The clusters are usually the lower numbered ones (<500).
The disk is a Seagate ST225 and and OMTI 5510 controller. We
bought them from Jade electronics a couple of months back.
Because of the randonmness of the errors, one of the hardware
types around thought that it might have something to do with
seek/settle times.
Does this sound reasonable? Is there any patch available to
DOS to modify the seek/settle times? Has anyone had any other
bad/good/indifferent experiences with Seagate Drives, OMTI
controllers or JADE elex?
Thanks very much in advance:
... uw-beaver david m chinn
!tikal!dataio box 639
!butler!chinn redmond, wash 98073Michael_Krause.ROCH@Xerox.COM (07/30/86)
If you decide to reformat your HD as a possible solution to your problem or to try low-level formating with different parameters (seek/settle times, etc.) I highly recomend using FASTBACK to do your back-up. If you've never heard of it, it is probably the best thing that's happened to hard drives since the invention of hard drives. It will COMPLETELY back-up a full 10Meg'r in about 20 minutes!... to previously unformatted diskettes!... and require even less time to back up the entire HD the second time around provided the original diskettes are use the second time. FASTBACK weighs in at a heafty $180 or so and puts around 450 K on each back-up diskette. The only part about FASTBACK that I don't really care for is the fact that the backed-up files need to be un-backed up (with FASTBACK) to be used; they aren't directly usable on the back-up diskettes. In fact, the diskettes aren't even readable (the directory area has been overwritten with data to make best use of the space). If you use a hard disk you can't go wrong getting this AMAZING product. mak
wjr@rayssd.UUCP (Bill) (10/13/86)
I'm running an XT-Turbo with a 10M harddisk and am getting divide overflow errors when trying to boot up from the hard disk. Now before anybody starts flaming me about "not" buying a real PC just hit your "n" key and continue on. Anyway, I am running with MS-DOS 3.1 and going through all the procedures to make the disk bootable. I have managed to use PC-DOS to format the disk and get the disk to boot before the disk "dies" trying to access other programs. Has anybody had this problem before or could I have a bad hard disk, bad MS-DOS, or just a crappy BIOS ROM? Speaking of BIOS ROM, does anybody have the ROM (EPROM/PROM) that is "very" compatable with an IBM PC XT, can be used on an XT TURBO and is willing to e-mail it to me. I can take the device code in almost any format and have the capabilities to burn the individual devices myself. Please, I'm not asking for an illegal copy of an IBM BIOS, but one that is compatable with MS-DOS 3.1 or higher that you can supply me with. Thanks, Bill Ramey
james@sunne.uucp (James Triplett) (10/14/86)
The question was how to get a good compatible BIOS ROM.
I recently received one from JDR Microdevices. They advertise
in various mags, including Byte. It is called 'PRO-BIOS' and
costs 19.95. I bought it mostly for curiosity, since my clone
already has a working BIOS chip. I popped out the old and
put in the new, and everything seems to work fine.
It is amazing to me that the clone industry has become so
compatible that I can move a ROM for some arbitrary clone
to some other clone and all works fine. So far as I know,
the xt motherboard that JDR sells is not the same as the
one I got (from Challenger Computers of Bedford, Mass-
another story with a happy ending so far).
Whenever I get funny hard disk problems, the following incantation
will generally banish any gremlins:
1- low level format ("hdformat" or some such, not a standard system
utility)
2- DOS FDISK
3- DOS FORMAT
The "divide overflow" usually means some process is finding some
bad info in the boot record, partition info, or FAT.
James Triplett, Sun Microsystems Boston Officebrown@nicmad.UUCP (10/14/86)
In article <239@rayssd.UUCP> wjr@rayssd.UUCP (Bill) writes: >I'm running an XT-Turbo with a 10M harddisk and am getting divide overflow >errors when trying to boot up from the hard disk. ... >... I am running with MS-DOS 3.1 and going through all the procedures >to make the disk bootable. I have managed to use PC-DOS to format the disk >and get the disk to boot before the disk "dies" trying to access other >programs. Has anybody had this problem before or could I have a bad hard disk, >bad MS-DOS, or just a crappy BIOS ROM? We ran into that problem while making an operating system make DOS compatible floppy diskettes. The result was that the first three bytes of the boot sector were wrong. Apparently when the machine boots, a check is made. Now, in our case is was floppies that were were using, so the boot track on the floppy wasn't really used, or needed. So we thought. When doing a DIR of the floppy, the divide overflow error came up. Without the first three bytes being correct, the floppy was unusable. For PC-DOS the requirements are: 2.10 - 3 byte near JUMP (E9h) 3.xx - 2 byte short JUMP (EBh) followed by a NOP (90h) The destination of the jump is the code within that boot sector. I hope this helps a little bit. As I said, it is the experience that we had with floppies, not hard disks. Use a program, after booting from floppy, like Norton's Utilities and look at the boot sector of the hard disk. Mike Brown -- ihnp4------\ harvard-\ \ Mr. Video seismo!uwvax!nicmad!brown topaz-/ / decvax------/