fc159145@seas.gwu.edu (William Lai) (12/07/90)
I am having problem installing the IDE drive I purchased for my 386-33 machine.
It is a Seagate ST-1144A IDE drive, and I am using it with a DTK PTI-215
IDE controller. The Bios on the 386 is AMI, dated 6-30-90.
The setup is as follows: 386-33 clone
VGA card
IDE controller
The IDE controller has a couple of jumpers, they are as follows:
W1: "enable or disable the embedded hard disk drive", enabled
W2: "used for old type hard disk such as Conner CP-342", set
to normal operation (not old type)
W3: "single or dual speed spindle motors for floppy drives, A
standard AT drive normally uses the single speed spindle
motor", set to single speed spindle motor.
W4: "Different data rates result in different precompensation
value. There are several possibilities obtained by setting
jumber W4 as follows:
One way:
Data Rate (KB/sec) Precompensation (ns)
---------------------------------------------------
500 125
---------------------------------------------------
250 125
300 125
---------------------------------------------------
250 125
250 125
---------------------------------------------------
1000 83
1000 83
---------------------------------------------------
Second way:
Data Rate (KB/sec) Precompensation (ns)
---------------------------------------------------
500 125
---------------------------------------------------
125 250
125 208
---------------------------------------------------
125 250
125 250
---------------------------------------------------
1000 83
1000 83
---------------------------------------------------
" (copied from DTK manual)
Having no idea what W4 does, I tried it both ways.
The BIOS support a couple drive type that corresponds with the Seagate
manual, and I tried them all:
Type Cynlinder Head Sectors Size (Meg)
----------------------------------------------------------
9 900 15 17 112
45 917 15 17 114
47 1024 14 17 119
^
|___User defined type
Using DOS 3.3 (IBM), I was able to partition the drive into 2 partition,
and formatted the first partition into 32 Meg successfully. However,
when I tried to access it from command line, such as "dir c:", most of the
times it just hangs up the whole machine. I have to do a hardware reset
to restart the machine.
If anyone has experience with this drive, I would appreciate it if you can
lend me a hand!
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
William Lai
fc159145@seas.gwu.edu
lai_wy%ncsd@gte.com