00cchall@bsu-ucs.uucp (NoWhere BBS and Bar) (11/09/90)
HELP! Everyone! My hard drive needs help badly...
Here's the situation:
o The drive is a 30 megabyte Tandon hard drive
o I've been running my BBS on it for two months
o I think it's quite old
o The configuration is 695 cylinders / 5 heads / MFM
o It "DIED" a couple of nights ago
o I tried Norton Disk Doctor and it messed it up more
o I LLF'ed it and it started to boot again
o It stopped working again
Here's what it gave me:
o Most of the time: "No ROM BASIC, System Halted"
(It's an 80286 VLSI 12 megahertz motherboard, AMI BIOS (11/89),
Western Digital XT-GEN controller, Multi-Drive II floppy controller,
1.44 M drive and 360 K drive, 1200 baud generic modem, Compaq CGA
card)
o Sometimes (earlier in the problem) it would start to boot, but then
stop cold and lock up
o Other times it would actually boot, but find a bunch of errors right
away:
- "Seek error on drive C"
- "General failure error on drive D"
- "General failure error on drive E"
- "General failure error on drive F"
o Norton said: "Your hard drive has an invalid partition info table"
Any suggestions will be considered!!!!!!!
Chael Hall
Internet - 00CCHALL@BSU-UCS.EDU
Bitnet - 00CCHALL@BSUVAX1.BITNET
UUCP - 00CCHALL@BSU-UCS.UUCPjc58+@andrew.cmu.edu (Johnny J. Chin) (11/11/90)
> (It's an 80286 VLSI 12 megahertz motherboard, AMI BIOS (11/89), > Western Digital XT-GEN controller, Multi-Drive II floppy controller, > 1.44 M drive and 360 K drive, 1200 baud generic modem, Compaq CGA > card) First of all, why are you using a Western Digital XT-GEN controller and a seperate floppy controller to operate the drives? The Western Digital XT-GEN uses IRQ5 and *NOT* IRQ14 which all 286/386 computers use. IRQ5 on 286/386's are used by LPT2. Also, the BIOS on this card will sometimes (not everytime) conflict with the system BIOS which is on the motherboard. They both have instructions on low-level formatting the drive. The BIOS on your system board will have drive parameters set in CMOS, while the one on the XT-GEN card will store the drive parameters on track 0. > - "Seek error on drive C" > - "General failure error on drive D" > - "General failure error on drive E" > - "General failure error on drive F" These errors are caused by the conflict in the parameter settings which I've explained above. In summary, I strongly suggest that you get the XT-GEN and the seperate floppy controller *OUT* of the computer and replace it with a Western Digital HD/FD controller (I believe the model # is WD-1003-VMM2). __________ ___ / \ / / /_/ / /\/ _/ / / / __/. /__ / / / / / / / / "Happy Computing ..." / / Internet: Johnny.J.Chin@andrew.cmu.edu / ------- / 4730 Centre Ave. #412 BITnet: jc58@andrew \__________/ Pittsburgh, PA 15213 UUCP: ...!uunet!andrew.cmu.edu!jc58 Computer Dr. Carnegie Mellon University "If you don't like having backups ... try driving without your spare tire." ______________________________________________________________________________ Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are STRICTLY my own, and not CMU's.