Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
November 27th, 2011, 10:27
like this drive
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Conner-Peripher ... 0676632640I have an old drive from the ibm 386 and the only problem in computer, is the drive because it doesnt work and gives an hard disk failed in bios
Can you please help me?? just for fun something that i can do to try to put the drive in working order, something easy to do

the drive spins up reports its capacity correctly and firmware in BIOS.... i have tried in my pentium 4 motherboard xD and reports all things correctly...
i can feel the arm taking off and try to read something after the drive gets the correct rpm but only produces the hard disk failed message
for example my old quantum hard drive with 270 mb only began to work correctly after i warmed it up to a better temperature
maybe it need more time to that HDD ?
like i say just for fun... i like to hear it working ahaha some noise
sorry for my bad english
December 2nd, 2011, 8:16
anyone has any tip?
December 2nd, 2011, 14:37
Provavelmente, se o disco está OK, deves estar a configurar mal na BIOS. Antigamente tinha-se que meter na BIOS manualmente os cilindros, cabeças, etc.
Verifica isso.
Probably, if the HD is OK, you are configuring wrongly the BIOS. Back in the days, you need to configure the BIOS and insert the Heads, cylinders, etc manually.
Check that.
December 3rd, 2011, 6:09
O problema é que na BIOS do pc original (de 1991) onde sempre funcionou deixou de dar dizendo a BIOS HARD DRIVE FAILURE depois do post :/
gostava de ver se conseguia fazer alguma coisa dele só pelo gozo de o ver a trabalhar de novo... tem la info antiga de jogos em DOS ... oh well good memories em 1997 usava o 386 vom este disco atirei o 386 fora por causa deste disco

erro meu
Ate o firmware é detectado correctamente :/
No windows xp comeca a instalar os drivers e diz nao iniciado em RAW e formatar dá erro :/
tentei fazer o truque de aquecer o disco no aquecedor a Oleo e sim resulta mas só nos quantum para já xD tenho um de 270MB que se recusa a trabalhar em frio xD qd mpassa meses sem o ligar e so depois de o aquecer é que consegue ir para a velocidade certa os pratos... antes disso fica inconstante a rotacao e nao desenvolve do post
The problem appears in the BIOS of the original computer too 386 ( from 1991) and says hard drive failed warning message after post
id love to see if i can get back in working order again because the platters rotate to normal speed 3600RPM i think and i can fell the arm moving ... the firmware is detected correctly 100MB hard drive
In windows xp i can install the drivers automaticaly but the appears as not ready and in RAW format and i cant format either:/
December 3rd, 2011, 10:54
seed.helper wrote:The problem appears in the BIOS of the original computer too 386 ( from 1991) and says hard drive failed warning message after post
[...]
In windows xp i can install the drivers automaticaly but the appears as not ready and in RAW format and i cant format either:/
Therefore the
first thing you must do is to fix the drive, so that it comes ready and can be formatted etc.
Then you can re-test that drive in the old PC (with the correct BIOS settings, as
pclab said, if the BIOS in the old PC does not have an "auto" drive setting).
December 4th, 2011, 10:43
what can i try before giving up??? im thinking in opening the drive to see whats enside.... but if i can put the drive in working order i will not do that
thanks vulcan
December 4th, 2011, 13:12
Consegues formatar o disco no P4?
Verifica se o disco está mesmo avariado ou se é problema de configuração.
Can you format the HD on the P4?
Check if the HD is really bad or if it's a configuration problem.
December 4th, 2011, 13:36
@pclab:
pclab wrote:Can you format the HD on the P4?
I
thought the OP answered that here (see below) - I don't believe that WinXP will run on a 386 CPU, so therefore he is running WinXP on the P4 for this answer below:
seed.helper wrote:In windows xp i can install the drivers automaticaly but the appears as not ready and in RAW format and i cant format either:/
And that is what confirmed to me that the drive needs to be fixed first, because if the drive is faulty (as I expect), then the main problem is
not the error messages from the 386 PC, as the OP originally reported - those error messages are likely to be correct, if the drive is faulty!
Or do you see things differently? Perhaps I misunderstood the OP's comments...
December 4th, 2011, 13:41
OOPPPSS didn't saw the part of the format from the OP.
But if the drive is well detected in BIOS he can do a check with MHDD or HDDScan.
December 4th, 2011, 14:50
pclab wrote:OOPPPSS didn't saw the part of the format from the OP.
OK
pclab wrote:But if the drive is well detected in BIOS he can do a check with MHDD or HDDScan.
On these drives, I think the whole f/w is on the PCB. If my memory is correct about that, the drive can respond normally to Identify Device commands (e.g. from the BIOS, so it can be detected there), but still be unable to perform any media command, if there are head or motor problems. Notice how the OP says that the drive is "not ready". If that is true, then MHDD / HDDScan will not be able to tell us anything more which is useful - but yes, as you say, they can be tried!
December 4th, 2011, 20:43
what i was saying is that i received the error message in the 386 computer hard drive failed... then pulled off and tried in my P4 computer
windows xp recnonizes the drive and installs the correctly drivers but doesnt appear in MY computer screen
The drive appears as not initialized ... but i cant format it because it gives errors... it seems some problem in the heads and if you are correct the firmware is stored in the pcb so the name appears correctly in BIOS (on the pentium 4 computer) but after that we have some mechanical problem
lets see if i can understand how mhdd works
December 4th, 2011, 21:32
Everything you are saying would fit with media access problems, although the drive is able to respond to Identify Device commands. As I mentioned before, I expect the drive really is faulty, but the fault is reported differently on your two PCs. I don't think MHDD will help you - I expect it just to show that the drive is not becoming ready when you try to do any media access, but you can work with
pclab to see what tests he wanted you to do.
Instead of trying to fix that drive, you could use some of the techniques mentioned by
fzabkar on the other Conner thread, to use a modern drive in your old PC. Just making an HPA might be all that you need to do, to reduce a modern PATA reported drive capacity, to something that is unlikely to overflow calculations in an old BIOS. In my experience, you don't always need to create a new BIOS table entry, if you are prepared to accept the usable drive capacity of an existing BIOS table entry, but Franc goes into more details in the other thread.
Good luck
December 5th, 2011, 0:37
thanks for the sugestions

yeah it seems the drive is toasted but i will let the drive warm up overnight (i will let the drive spinning for several hours) and tomorrow when it continues to say failed ( or maybe not) but i dont have any hope

i will let the drive on the trash bin
December 15th, 2011, 9:54
the only think i can do with that drive is measuring the RPM 3590 -3600...
oh well the internal check routines give allways drive failed status.... there is nothing more we can do
even after several hours powered up... allways came back failed
Powered by phpBB © phpBB Group.