Quantum Lightning 540 AT Hard Disk

From: Tothwolf <tothwolf_at_concentric.net>
Date: Wed Jul 30 15:02:00 2003

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 vance_at_neurotica.com wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Doc wrote:
>
> > > True, and sometimes whats printed on the drive does not match what
> > > the drive reports to the BIOS. Of course, sometimes people would use
> > > settings from a book of hard drive settings, especially when the
> > > drive was already installed. The settings printed in such a book
> > > don't always match whats printed on the drive or what the drive
> > > reports to the BIOS.
> >
> > Not only that, but Quantum was the worst about mislabelling drives.
> > I've seen several sub-1GB Quantum IDE drives with SCSI jumper settings
> > on the label, or vice versa, and many with the wrong size and
> > geometry.
>
> So there isn't any reliable way of knowing the drive geometry on older
> IDE drives? Another reason for me to not use IDE whenever possible. I
> think the only machine I have that has IDE in it is my Powerbook.

The most reliably way seems to be to always allow the system to
auto-detect the drive's settings. Some enhanced or non-standard ATA
controllers will still sometimes allocate space on the drive in a
nonstandard way, so you still have to watch those. Of course this won't
help for an old drive that someone is trying to recover data from...

-Toth
Received on Wed Jul 30 2003 - 15:02:00 BST