Seagate ST3144A

[barak]

Hi Gurus!

I have an ancient patient Seagate ST3144A which behaves quite strange. When connected to PC3K it will not spin. BUT when I loose ATA-cable and powew it again, it will spin. And if I now connect the ATA-cable it will become ready as well. So far so good. The problem is that DE can read only about 5% of the surface. The correct read sectors are not random but regularly and periodacally found ones.

Does anyone remember anything about this kind of disks?

[fzabkar]

ftp://ftp.seagate.com/techsuppt/at/st3144a.txt

This drive does not support LBA mode. You need to connect it to a motherboard than understands CHS mode.

You will find that when PC3K attempts to access LBA 1, the drive will respond with CHS 0/0/1 which is in fact the first sector.

[barak]

Thank you for your reply!

[day1data]

Most people don't know but PC3K is more than capable of reading old CHS drives.

First you need to open the program with one of the PATA ports selected and connect the drive to the PATA port (obviously )

Then before powering on the drive you need to go to
Tools > Settings > Then the PC-3000 Ports Tab > Select the current port that is being used > then click edit, click the drop down box and select PIO0.
Confirm all dialog boxes and power on the drive.
Your PC3K can now read CHS.
Also don't forget to convert it back to PIO4 when you are finished or you won't be able to read LBA.

Now you don't have to buy a useless old 286/486 PC that is sitting around collecting dust

[fzabkar]

PIO/UDMA mode has nothing to do with LBA/CHS mode. In fact I would think that it would be possible to run a 10TB drive in PIO Mode 0. Maybe something got lost in the trasnlation from Russian to English? In any case I would have thought that a $10K tool should be able to recognise the fact that the drive cannot support LBA mode and then automatically switch to CHS mode.

[pepe]

For a long time it has not been able to clone in CHS mode, which was pretty much absurd but still...
I heard some rumors they added support lately, which is absurd as well, nobody uses CHS drives anymore. We 2 per year 10 years ago, which reduced to 0 these years. When i requested such thing those years, i was told it is not (!) possible because of some BS reasons. Then they added it years later when nobody needs it. Kinda nonsense...
PIO has nothing to do with CHS in general, if they modded the util to use chs if u set PIO0, thats another strange mixup of things...

[maximus]

This drive does not support LBA mode. You need to connect it to a motherboard than understands CHS mode.

I am going off my memory of results from testing I did months ago, but I believe that the following statements are true, to the best of my knowledge.

For a computer hookup, I don't think the motherboard needs to understand CHS mode, not unless you were trying to boot from that drive. The motherboard only needs to have the PATA connector on board (or even a card). As long as the drive responds to the device inquiry command and can be seen by an OS such as Linux, the OS will take over how to read the drive. And from what I can tell from a drive that I have that is CHS only, Linux figures out how to read it just fine. So something like ddrescue should work to read it, or HDDSuperClone in SCSI passthrough mode (NOT ATA passthrough as that is not currently compatible), as both use OS calls to read.

Of course this information does not help much for a hardware imager support for CHS...

[barak]

Thank you all for your valuable replys.

Linux and ddrescue nailed it.

CEntOS is installed on not-so-old-motherboard and OS is on SATA disks. Motherboard does have PATA connection on it though. So with this case that was enough.

This is an example of how data is safe but there is no machine to read the data. The client has been kept the valuable data on disk on safe place for further use. Now when the data was needed there was no suitable computer anymore on hands.

[maximus]

Glade to hear this was successful. What I don't understand is why such a well known and expensive tool as PC3000 does not easily handle cases like this. This is a simple software issue, the hardware is already capable of reading the data. All it takes is a small amount of software programming to handle CHS, and the output from the identify device command has a bit that indicates if the drive can support LBA mode or not. I have not done it in my own software yet because it is not high demand, maybe the same is true for them? A computer running Linux just beat a PC3000, there should be no reason for that.

[pepe]

yes, it is odd, it is hard to understand ace guys sometimes. I proposed several ideas which were kindly refused first, saying there's no need for those and i can solve my problem otherwise, then some years later the solutions just appeared in the utils. I am talking about 5 minute programming tasks, so really no idea why they are making trouble of these.

[day1data]

I know its strange and doesn't make sense switching PIO mode to read CHS but it works. Why don't you guys just try it?

In fact i just recovered a WDAL2170 (170MB IDE) drive yesterday using PC3K

[pepe]

I believe you of course (anything can happen while using pc3k ), it's just odd.
I think it's a bug called feature:)

[Martin]

Glade to hear this was successful. What I don't understand is why such a well known and expensive tool as PC3000 does not easily handle cases like this. This is a simple software issue, the hardware is already capable of reading the data. All it takes is a small amount of software programming to handle CHS, and the output from the identify device command has a bit that indicates if the drive can support LBA mode or not. I have not done it in my own software yet because it is not high demand, maybe the same is true for them? A computer running Linux just beat a PC3000, there should be no reason for that.

Ace Lab fit all their software to some standard (in this case - reading in LBA mode). Of course, it relates to kind of programming, so despite to change only type of request (usually several minutes of coding) they have to make multiply changes through all their software. In such situations it is VERY HARD to make them do some changes. As day1data said, they provide some solution for CHS mode, I would say it is a GRAN VICTORIA.

[data-medics]

I know its strange and doesn't make sense switching PIO mode to read CHS but it works. Why don't you guys just try it?

In fact i just recovered a WDAL2170 (170MB IDE) drive yesterday using PC3K

I believe day1data is correct about this. I had a CHS drive a while back that I was struggling to read with PC-3000 and apparently I didn't have a motherboard handy that could support CHS. I seem to remember that with enough farting around I did finally get it reading on PC-3000 but I can't remember exactly how I had done it.

[pepe]

it was just odd that in the ages when chs drives almost died out, but still came in for recovery they pretty much refused the idea of implementing it, and in the last few years (months?) they just decided to make it, when it is of lot less importance than other things.
And it is even less logical that the way you access this feature is kind of hidden.

[maximus]

Ace Lab fit all their software to some standard (in this case - reading in LBA mode). Of course, it relates to kind of programming, so despite to change only type of request (usually several minutes of coding) they have to make multiply changes through all their software. In such situations it is VERY HARD to make them do some changes. As day1data said, they provide some solution for CHS mode, I would say it is a GRAN VICTORIA.

I call that hard coding, meaning coding something in multiple places about the same way because you think you will never need to change it. And then when you want to change it, you suddenly realize you coded yourself into a corner, and it becomes a big task to fix it. As an amateur programmer I can very much understand this. I guess even the pros can do this to themselves...

[Martin]

I do not blame them, they have talanted engineers and they did a good product. Only one thing, they are not flexible enough, and moreover they still have strange "features" when develop engineer talks with usual customers like call operator instead to bring maximum efforts for very important research.

[pepe]

yes, when i talk to individual developers i get very good and adequate responses (and they are helpful), but when i wrote emails to TS i got BS answers several times. It was years ago though. My recent experiences are a lot better.

[Martin]

Exactly, better to talk with developer directly, bypassing managment's burocracy.

[guru]

PIO MODE 0 was never supported in Acelabs old FPGA. CHS OR LBA or even 48bit LBA is all taksfile access, nothing special. As far as I remember anyway