Quantum Lightning 540 AT Hard Disk

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Tue Jul 29 17:41:00 2003

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Roger Bisson wrote:

> I have an old Quantum Lightning 540 AT hard disk containing some data I
> want to retrieve. The drive itself was removed from a computer some
> years ago (about 7 or 8 years), working as far as I remember.
>
> However, now, having tried to install the drive in a more modern machine
> to archive the data to CDR, the drive while recognized by the machine
> and the drive itself spinning up and apparently working returns a "hard
> disk read failure" error.
>
> Trawling the web, I found a short thread entitled "HD repair techniques"
> on cctalk. Like the original author of this thread, I too have a drive
> that contains data that is perhaps not worth the hundreds of pounds
> (GBP) that professional data recovery entails but wouldn't mind
> recovering the data all the same.
>
> Can anybody point me in the direction of any good information regarding
> the testing/diagnosis/repair of head-disk-assembly problems?

First off, don't rush to "repair" or open up the HDA. From the sounds of
it, the drive itself may not be the problem at all.

Do you remember if your computer used an enhanced or caching type hard
drive controller? Many of these controllers allocated space on the drive
differently than an industry standard ATA controller did.

Do you know if you had access to the full 540MB of drive space? DOS had a
limit of ~527MB back then, but it was often worked around by using a 3rd
party ATA controller with LBA. Maybe your newer system is trying to use
LBA, when the drive was formatted without it?

If you used a plain ATA controller, with or without LBA, there is also a
possibility that the drive was originally formatted with a different CHS
(cylinders/heads/sectors) than what the drive will report when it is
auto-configured by a modern BIOS.

-Toth
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 17:41:00 BST