Quantum Lightning 540 AT Hard Disk

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Tue Jul 29 14:43:00 2003

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, TeoZ wrote:
> Wasnt there a problem in the old days of IDE on pc's where a drive formatted
> on one controller had to be reformatted on a different brand controller to
> work?

That was the case with ST506/412 interface drives on the XT.
On the AT, the controllers were almost standardized.
Most of the young whippersnappers who think that the AT was
the first computer, have never encountered that problem.
Sometimes, the incompatibility was as trivial as one controller
was formatting sectors numbered 0 - 16, while another was 1-17.


And with an IDE drive, the "controller" is part of the drive
assembly - the board in the computer is an interface card,
not a controller. (the board in the computer doesn't make
any of the choices of formatting parameters)


> Also was the HD formatted with one of those programs that allowed
> larger drives to work with systems that couldnt normally use them? Were you
> using stacker or some other compression software on this hd?

What is the exact wording of the message? Who is coming up with
the error (DOS?, BIOS?)
If the drive is being recognized, but gives the error when trying
to boot, or doing a DIR, then the problem may be just a few bad
sectors, and be a totally different problem than being completely
unable to read any part of the drive at all.

> The oldest IDE drive I have thats being used at all is a 500mb conner drive,
> and it spins up and works fine on newer hardware. Make sure you using auto
> detect in the bios or try changing the method your machine uses to read the
> drive (LBA, 32 bit access, pio modes etc)

Didn't some of the earliest IDE drives not support "auto-detect"?
But surely a 540AT would be too new for that. Nevertheless, it
might not hurt to manually put in the parameters for the drive.
What are they for that drive?


Can we assume that the machine will boot from floppy?
If so, can the diagnostics of Speedstor see the drive properly?
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 14:43:00 BST