fer@phyllis.math.binghamton.edu (fernando guzman) (03/03/90)
Please E-mail any suggestions, if the following sounds familiar, and you know what to do. THE HARDWARE 1. IBM-PC (not an XT, just the plain old PC) with 64K RAM on board and additional RAM boards for a total of 640K RAM. 2. Western Digital WD1002-27X hard disk controller wiht 62000094-xxx BIOS chip. 3. A Seagate ST-277R-1 hard disk with the following specs: 820 cylinders, 6 heads, 26 sectors/track for a total formatted capacity of 65Mb. This is to replace a faulty ST-238R, that worked fine with the above card. THE SOFTWARE 1. MS-DOS 3.3 2. ONTRACK's Disk Manager that includes: DM.EXE : the formattiong and partitioning program . DMDRVR.BIN: the device driver. THE PROBLEMS 1. The formatting and partitioning program, Disk Manager, does not recognize the drive correctly. The specs for the ST-277R are: 820 cylinders, 6 heads, 26 sectors/track for a total of 65Mb. DM has these values on its table, but when ST-277R is selected, it formats the disk as 1023 cylinders, 6 heads, 17 sectors/track for a total of 53Mb. 2. DM recommends creating a small DOS partition, since the BIOS will only recognize 4 heads, and parts of this first partition will be wasted. That sounds reasonable, but the BIOS on the WC1002-27X controller is supposed to handle up to 16 heads and is currently set up for up to 8 heads. 3. DM installs the system files on the first partition, but on exiting DM, the hard disk is not bootable. It just hungs in there. To sum up, I have now a non-bootable hard disk, with 53Mb usable (and 12Mb lost somewhere) in 3 partitions. Without the dmdrvr.bin driver that came with DM, only the first (1Mb) of the 3 partitions is usable, but all files stored previously using the dmdrvr.bin device driver, are garbage. Conversely, anything I store without dmdrvr.bin becomes garbage when the device driver is loaded. What I most desperately need is to make the disk bootable. Eventually, I want to access the "lost" 12Mb. Fernando Guzman
del@fnx.UUCP (Dag Erik Lindberg) (03/05/90)
In article <3083@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> fer@phyllis.math.binghamton.edu (fernando guzman) writes: >1. MS-DOS 3.3 >2. ONTRACK's Disk Manager that includes: > DM.EXE : the formattiong and partitioning program . > DMDRVR.BIN: the device driver. > I had a great deal of difficulty getting dmdrvr.bin to work with RLL controllers, in particular the WD1002-27x and the Adaptec 2070a. I gave up and went to Golden Bow's Vfeature. It has it's annoyances, but it works. A delightfull side effect of using this package was that I could access the extra 200 cylinders on a Maxtor 1140 that are not normally supported by AT/DOS machines, (1224 cylinders, usually only 1024 are accessible). -- del AKA Erik Lindberg .signature? I don't have no .signature... I don't have to show you no stinking .signature...