Hard Drive and Floppies
The Midnight Question Archive
see the new: Hard Drive Failure Troubleshooting Flowchart
and Start Your Own PC Business
Copyright 2005 by Morris Rosenthal
Hard Drive and FloppiesThe Midnight Question Archive see the new: Hard Drive Failure Troubleshooting Flowchart and Start Your Own PC Business Copyright 2005 by Morris Rosenthal |
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Troubleshooting your Laptop or PC
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See the new Troubleshooting your laptop or PC (May 2008)3/15/99"Should my hard drives power down on Windows shut down?". I'm running Windows 98 with an AMD K6-2 300 on a generic TX AGP main board, with two hard drives. I have a CD writer as a primary slave, and a regular CD drive as the secondary slave. Recently I noticed that the drives (or at least one of them) continue to spin after Windows says "It's safe to shutdown your PC", and the hard drive indicator light on my tower stays on, then when I physically hit the power switch I here a "cluck" noise from one or both of the drives. I believe this situation to be software related, maybe by Norton Anti Virus, but I disabled the auto protect and no change. I also have tried every software/bios related setting I could think of and it still happens. Tom (A) Sounds like your system is going into standby rather than OFF. This depends on how the motherboard logic triggers the power supply, and can generally be diddled in CMOS Setup. (This is a good example of me not really understanding the question the way it's intended.) Morris (C) Fact is, on standby the hard drives do power down, and I've tried going on standby then shutting down, but when I do the hard drive(s) power up just before the shut down process is complete. Tom (A) Pretty neat, well, not in a good way. The hard drives themselves probably incorporate some slick power saver logic, but they still can't trump the motherboard on shutting down the power supply. It sounds like the shut-down signal from your motherboard is either not-happening, or the power supply isn't monitoring it. I haven't put enough time in on these things to give you any good ideas, but I'd sure appreciate to hear from you if you work it out, and post it for others. (Here I still am missing the point.) Morris (A) I've come up with the solution to this problem, so I wanted to let you in on it. The problem stemmed from Norton Antivirus 5.0, which seems to have several shut down issues related to it's operation under Windows 98. Norton has fixes for shut down problems related to this software at it's web site, http://www.symantec.com/us.index.html , but the fix which solved my problem was the removal of the "NAVEX" entry in the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\control\Shutdown\Exclusion List Everything works fine after removing this entry. Tom 3/4/99(Q) Where can I buy Notebook parts, have data recovered from my hard drive, find some of these second hand parts and deals you write about? Composite (A) I've put together a short list of vendors of used, reconditioned, hard to find parts and services. I've never spoken to or dealt directly with any of these people (except Electrified), I just visited their web sites to gather this info. Caveat Emptor. Morris 3/2/99(Q) In relation to copying whole drives you wrote: The XCOPY method doesn't work with Windows 95, you need to use third part software to do the copy. Another person suggested to me just today the site: http://www.vdsarg.com for the software "COPY ALL." XCOPY works fine with DOS/Windows systems, but you have to set the boot pation active on the new Master, which means you need a boot floppy with FDISK on it. The newer versions of Windows NT come with several levels of software RAID that allow you to mirror the drives, and switch as nescessary. Morris (an old posting from somewhere) (A) Briefly, I disagree. XCOPY works perfectly, if you do it right, and I use it all the time to setup systems. You have to run it from a DOS prompt inside of Win 95/98. If you type XCOPY /? you will see the list of switches that will let you copy the hidden files, overwrite read onlyfiles, etc. Also, from running it inside 95/98, you do get the proper long file names on the target drive. Usually, something like: D:\>XCOPY C:\*.* /K /E /H /R /C will grab the whole drive properly. At least, it has for me, repeatedly. David 11/24/98(Q) I have two hard drives currently installed, and one CD-ROM for a total of 3 IDE devices. Currently, there is a Western Digital Caviar 2.1 Gig as primary master (C:) and no primary slave. Then I have a Maxtor 8.4 Gig as secondary master (D:) and the CD-ROM drive as secondary slave. I am trying to swap the C: and D: drives. First, I copied all files from the C: drive to the D: drive, so that they are exact duplicates to avoid any broken shortcuts or program errors once the change is made. Then I turned off the computer and switched the IDE interface cables between the two hard drives, and reset the jumpers to what should have been correct (the Maxtor now primary master and Western Digital secondary master). Then, I turned on the computer and ran the setup. I ran the IDE auto-detection utility and configured the drives. They appeared to work fine, but when I saved and restarted, the computer aborted loading Windows 95 and gave a "corrupt registry" error, then shut down displaying "It is now safe to turn off your computer." So, I reset the cables and jumpers and reran the setup program and everything works. Aubrey The XCOPY method doesn't work with Windows 95, you need to use third part software to do the copy. Another person suggested to me just today the site: http://www.vdsarg.com for the software "COPY ALL." XCOPY works fone with DOS/Windows systems, but you have to set the boot pation active on the new Master, which means you need a boot floppy with FDISK on it. The newer versions of Windows NT come with several levels of software RAID that allow you to mirror the drives, and switch as nescessary Morris 11/19/98(Q) A while back I upgraded my girlfriends Compaq Presario 486 DX4 (900 series I think) from Win 3.1.1 to Win 95. It only had one hard drive - 700meg - and a CD-ROM both connected to its only channel. Once I upgraded the OS, disc space as expected decreased greatly and she found herself in need of more. She didn't use the CD-ROM that much and I had a spare 500meg disc. So, I disconnected the CD-ROM and plugged in the new hard disc. I booted the machine up and the BIOS detected the new drive and so everything was cool - she had more space - I got a nice dinner. However, just to check I could go back on myself I disconnected the new hard drive and reconnected the CD-ROM. Disaster! The machine goes through a partial boot process and then just hangs, blank screen. Anyway shortly after this I fell ill, she was angry at me and we haven't spoken since. Perhaps you could offer some advice - Computers that is - not relationships. Surinder (A) Good thing you don't need relationship advice, a guy who stays up after midnight answering e-mail from strangers doesn't have much to offer on the subject. Hard to guess exactly what went wrong, although it may just be CMOS failing to "un-autodetect" the second drive. Could also be something simple like a forgotten slave jumper or a partially disslodged IDE cable, at any of the 3 connection points. Either way, if you can't get it going, I'd stick the second hard drive back in and try to get it working again, and if the PC still hangs during boot, try using <F8> to get to safe mode. If you can't get that far, it's most likely a simple hardware screw-up and not a Win95 problem. Morris 10/29/98(Q) I am currently upgrading a 486 from Windows CE to Windows 95 for a friend of ours. I formated the HD in dos and I purchased a new HD with a larger capacity - 420Mb but the computer couldn't recognise it at start-up. I then set the jumpers to 'Slave' and linked it from the original. This worked. But now I am constantly getting a message on the start up screen saying - "NO ROM BASIC SYSTEM HALTED". Is this a type of bios/ cmos? and if so, is it possible to reinstall it? If it is possible, where might I get a copy from, and how should I install it? Aidan (A) It just means that the PC is aware that the drive is there, but isn't finding boot tracks, so is defaulting (trying to default) to ROM BASIC, which was present in the original IBM AT. You need to boot from a Win 95 floppy and run SYS.EXE, or reformat with FORMAT C: /S Morris 10/28/98(Q) I have a question regarding this error; "Floppy disk(s) fail (40)" I took an old 386, replaced the board with an FIC 503+ AMD K6-266 3D. Upon boot up I am getting this error message "Floppy disk(s) fail (40)" Replaced the 3.5 fdd with a new one and still... the same error message. New ribbon cable with the old power supply cable...OK?. FDD lights up, but does not spin up at boot. Hence, I am not able to load the OS until I get this FDD working properly. Scott I guess it's been a good year since I posted a floppy drive question. The answer is almost always the same thing - ribbon cable connections. I have to guess that the floppy cable is on backwards, or you've bent some connector pins out of the way on the drive, or the cable is half on at one end or the other. On good method of troubleshooting is to take the drive out (if it's in), put the ribbon cable on, making sure to put the red key wire next to the pin 1 location and that all 34 pins seat in the connector, snake the cable through as you install the drive and connect it at the motherboard end, keeping the key wire next to pin 1. If it still doesn't work, then you can worry about CMOS Settings, the controller, or the drive. Morris 9/1/98(Q) Here's my situation: I've been handed-down a 486 with a crashed hard drive. While looking for a new one, I've been confronted with all kinds of disheartening acronyms like EIDE, SCSI, UDMA, etc. I know my computer has a controller card (I've heard some drives connect directly to the motherboard), and I'm assuming that it's a plain old IDE card. After some Internet research, it seems like EIDE is the most appropriate for me. Will I have to buy a new EIDE controller card to use an EIDE drive? Does anyonemake IDE drives anymore? Can you make an EIDE drive use an IDE controller card? Arnold (A) EIDE is backwards compatible, meaning you can run anything except a SCSI drive on your old controller. You can install a UDMA drive, you just won't get any benefit from the built in Ultra DMA data transfer capacity. Your computer BIOS may have trouble dealing with the size of the drive, just buy the smallest you can find. Overlay software, like ONTRACK, is available free from most drive manufacturers for their drives, which will let your older PC get close to the full capacity out of a multi-gigabyte drive. Morris 8/27/98(Q) I have just been given as a present a 4.5 Gig Quantum Atlas II SCSI hard drive and now I have to figure a way to hitch it up. From what I can find out, it's going to require that I buy an Ultra wide differential adapter and cable for about $250.00. In the past I have had only IDE drives, which are quite simple to hitch up. My question is, are these SCSI drives as dependable as the IDE and are they really as fast as they say. Can an amateur such as myself get into a lot of trouble trying to configure it ? Bill (A) No trouble, they are quite easy to hook up. SCSI drives are also generally backwards compatible to older SCSI standards, which means you can buy a cheap SCSI card for $50 or less. I'd be surprised if you really need a differential controller, which is otherewise pointless in a PC (they are designed for long cable runs), and since you could buy a regular 4GB IDE for much less than $250, it wouldn't make sense. I checked the Quantum web site, the only interface version which uses differential is the XP4550D Fast Wide. I couldn't tell from what I read if it could be adapted for single-ended use, although they state that the drive is SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 compliant. You aren't going to get a performance gain that means enough to shell out $250 for a controller in a single user system, this drive is really designed for servers and arrays. Morris 8/26/98(Q) Using three different 486 VL Bus Motherboards I have had the same problem. Everything in the computer works fine except the floppy drive. The drive lights come on at the appropriate times the hard drive functions fine. Any installed devices are found and configured properly by Win 95. If I attempt to access from Windows I get the message the disk is not formated and do I want to format now. If I attempt to access from DOS, I simply get 'not ready reading drive a:' abort, retry, or fail? If I take the motherboard out and replace it with a 486 PCI board, everything including floppies work fine. I am using known good disks and known good floppy drives. I have tried numerous VL IDE controllers as well as standard ISA IDE controllers. At first I thought it was just a problem with one particular motherboard but I have since experience the exact same problem on to other similar VL motherboards. Dykon (A) I'm afraid it's probably one of those brain lock conditions I often get into myself, I can't suggest anything other than going back to ground zero and starting your troubleshooting over again. It sounds like you've done everything you should have, but you must have skipped something. VLB (Vesa Local Bus) motherboards have a way of toasting the CPU over time, and any troubleshooting should include returning to ISA video and SIDE. The PCI motherboard you had success with would have a built in floppy controller, so we don't know that your ISA controller is really good. Morris 8/18/98(Q) I just had my small accounting office server cut over from Novell 3.11 to Windows NT Server. In the past, when I had server problems, it usually cost a couple thousand dollars of software and hardware to fix. This happened on a regual basis. When tax season rolls around this year, I don't want to face the same old problems. I intended to use NT for disk mirroring, but discovered there are no empty drive bays in my brand new Compaq! Can I use an external SCSI drive for mirrioring, and will this prevent future crashes? Roger (A) NT Server supports disk mirroring (RAID Levels 1 and 5, I think) using whatever hard drives Disk Administrator can configure. However, even if you fully mirror your current drive, you are only protecting against hardware failure of that hard drive, which is less common than a host of other possible server problems. If you accidentally delete files, corrupt data, get a virus, it will effect both drives, as will a hard drive contoller failure, or any device failure that renders the bus inoperable. A hardware implemented RAID array will protect you better, but it's still just a hard drive approach. With hardware so cheap, the best solution for most small business is to have a spare workstation that is built up enough to act as a server in a pinch, equipped with the same tape drive as the server. The more elegant approach is to run a backup domain server, which means another dedicated machine to mirrior the whole server. Morris 8/10/98(Q) Is there such a thing as a disc parking utility for Win95, like Timepark for DOS? Is it still the useful thing it was under DOS (ie. while the disc is idle, to minimize the time that the heads spend in cyl 0 where the FAT, root directory, MBR and DBR live.)? Would this interfere with virtual memory too much? Craig (A) I'm not familiar with Timepark, but I do remember all of the old DOS disk parking utilities that were intended to protect the drive when the system was moved. These all became obsolete with the advent of the self-parking drive, around 10 years ago. I've always assumed that when not engaged, the heads on modern hard drives automatically go to the parked location. Anyway, all new systems support a "sleep" mode for the hard drive, doesn't just park the heads, but spins down when the system is inactive for a while. All parking asside, hard drives are ridiculously reliable, the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is above 150,000 hours for most drives, that is something around 20 years, so I wouldn't worry about trying to extend that. Morris 8/3/98(Q) A neighbor of mine has an aluminum milling machine whose robotics/computer controller has a very old NEC (D5124) 10 meg hard drive with a ST412 interface. The manufacturer wants $3000 to rebuild the HDD and $6000 to replace it. Is there any source for these old hard drives? David (A) You tell that manufacturer that he is a criminal to even suggest such a damn thing. If you search the back of "Computer Shopper" carefully, you'll pick up on the dealers who sell old and remanufactured drives, a 10MB with a ST412 interface should be yours for under $50. I've also got to believe that you could get a whole new controller from a different manufacturer for the milling machine for less that the $3000 this crook wants to repair it. Man, I hate jerks like that. Morris 7/13/98(Q) I have just built a pentium 90 but when I boot it up in displays invald system disk even through there is no disk in there. If I insert a boot disk the system will load in to c: and lets me see the harddrive but typing win does not load 98. I have set the bios correctly and for the life of me cannot understand why the disk drive does this,please help I am going crazy. James (A) The "Invalid System Disk" just means that your C: drive is not bootable. There can be a lot of reasons for this, the drive parameters may have been changed, the system files may be corrupted, you could even have gotten a virus. I'm unsure from your e-mail what you have on there, but you might just try re-installing Win 98. A couple warnings: if this continues after reinstalling succesfully, it could be the hard drive is actually bad, it happens - also, you may have a Win 98 problem on a system that old, I haven't the experience with installing it enough time to say yet. Certainly when '98 is installed it should start on boot without you having to type "win". Morris 7/6/98(Q) While installing a modem driver upgrade in my father-in-laws computer. The system had to reboot so the changes would work. The boot halted and said insert bootable disk. After checking the CMOS I discovered no hard drives were recognized. They would not auto detect nor could they be set manually. The machine is a 200 mhz Pent. by Sony. the BIOS is megatrend 1.00.05.dd04. Sony is no help so far. Dana (A) Sounds like you dislodged a hard drive IDE cable when you had the case open. It's either that or a coincidental hardware failure of the drive or controller, both pretty unlikely. Reseat the cable at both ends and give it a whirl. Morris 6/10/98(Q) Any idea what might cause a HDC failure at start-up? The I/O card works fine in another computer, as does the hard drive. I've also tried another I/O card, 2 other cables and a differant power connector. The CMOS auto-configure for IDE drives doesn't detect it? If I manually set the drives parameters it still does the same thing, hangs for a minute or so then says HDC failure. Mark One oddball problem is a conflict with the video card, something that I used to see with old Tridents as they aged. If there are any other adapters you can pull, I would, and you can try swapping the adapters around in the slots. You might have slipped up when installing the known good card and controller, if not, it sounds like the MB may be on the way out. Still, always worth trying a third controller. By the way, if the controller was VESA, swap it for an plain ISA. Morris 6/9/98(Q) Can I ask for your help on building an external drive. What I would like is a standard IDE drive capable of connecting to the parallel port on a standard PC. This would serve the purpose of being a portable HDD which should be capable of using on any PC. I have never see anything like this but I'm sure with a bit of ingenuity should be possible. Custom s/w would have to be written to address this device (?) but I wouldn't of thought it would be much more difficult than simply addressing LPT1 as a HDD. Any Alister (A) Actually, a friend of mine has one, he used to use it to install software on PCs without CD drives, now a rareity. It seems to me I've seem them advertised fairly cheap through mail-order channels, but I'm not sure what the mail-order situation in the UK is like. Basically, the product was a shell that the hard drive was placed in, an AC transformer for supplying low voltage AC, and a small power supply to rectify into DC. It came with software for Windows 3.1 and 95, don't recall if DOS was an option, probably. For software installation, you could probably get more use out of a Iomega or Syquest cartridge drive. Morris 5/7/98(Q) On an Acer Aspire Computer at boot, I keep getting the message "On Board Serial Port 2 Conflict Equipment Configuration Error" When I ckeck the modem properties, it shows that there is no conflect on COM2. Also, the System Properties, Device Manager, Resources shows that there is no conflict on Communication Port (COM2). Bill (A) Sounds like your Com1 and Com2 ports are included on the motherboard (the usual case for all newer systems), and that you need to go into CMOS setup and dissable or move to another address the existing Com2 port. If you didn't have a Plug-n-Play BIOS, it wouldn't be smart enough to pick up on this conflict. (Bill got back that this fixed the problem, the key-combo for Acer to enter CMOS was Ctrl-Alt-Esc) Morris 5/6/98(Q) How can undo a split of a hard drive? The hard drive is app. 4.3Gb and split into three (3) sections. I want it to show after the undoing one section, drive "D:\" for example. Adrian (Q) You're talking about repartioning. A program like "Partion Magic" will do it, I may have mentioned a few others in the FAQ. If you don't mind losing all of your data, you can simply delete all the partions and start over. Actually, I posted this question to work in the web address of the best hard drive and controller FAQ I've seen - It's billed as EIDE and Fast ATA stuff, has lots more- http://thef-nym.sci.kun.nl/cgi-pieterh/atazip/atafq.html Morris 4/10/98 - Happy Passover and Good Friday(Q) I would like to replace the 5.25 drive on a Leading Edge Model D XT with a 3.5 drive. Is this feasible and straightforward? I have a 3.5 drive from an AST 286, but the cables are not compatible. Would I need to buy a different drive? Are cable adaptors available? Would a controller card be necessary? Bluto (A) The Model D (and no other XT I'm aware of) doesn't support any of the 3.5" drives without a BIOS upgrade or a controller with a replacement BIOS on it. These have to be specifically designed for the XT to fool it, since the floppy setting are controlled by motherboard DIP switches or jumpers, and the 3.5" formats hadn't even been invented yet. For the cost of the special XT high density floppy adapter with BIOS, you could probably find a second-hand 486, completely equiped. Morris (Q) I have one more question about the Model D XT: Can I hook up one of the I/O ports via cable to a new PC? I know I can't use the Windows program for Direct Cable Connection since it must be run on both computers. What I would like to do is transfer some old WordPerfect 5.0 files and I don't know anyone with a 5.25/3.5 system to copy them. Bluto (A) Laplink will work, if you can find somebody wth a copy. So will the Interlnk, supplied with DOS 6.0 and up, though you'd have to get it booted on the XT also. Another option is to copy the files onto 360KB floppies, then take the drive out of the Leading Edge and temporarily hook it to your newer PC as the B: drive to copy them on. Morris 4/8/98(Q) Can you recomend a "link" or tell me how to coax an IBM H3342-A4 342 MB hard drive to co-exist with other drives. Such as -- Conner CP30254H or Conner CP30104H ETAL. I have a pair of these (IBM H3342-A4) drives and they seem to relate to each other nicely (M/S S/M) etc. but not with others Lynn (A) I'm not sure that you'll be able to, unless your other IDE drives sport some compatability jumpers. At 342MB, the IBM drives are old enough to fall into the category of "kinda compatible drives" when there were "slave present", "ATA compliant", and a couple other extra jumpers for getting drives to play together that I don't even remember. However, on any newer system, with primary and secondary controllers, the IBMs or Conners should be OK on their own controllers. Morris 3/30/98(Q) I replaced the CMOS battery in my 486 DX2-66 (CD/Floppy/Floppy) and immediately had trouble booting up. It started slowly, half the time freezing on the 'windows clouds' and worsened over a couple of weeks until all boots froze on 'windows clouds', then after fiddling around for a while I got 'HDD Controller Failure', F1, 'Insert Boot Disk'. I did a scandisk using the boot diskette and 'A'was OK, all other drives were not accessable. After reading your book I replaced the SIDE Adapter Card but got the same results, so I thought for sure my HDD was dead, but if that's true, why can't I still access B drive? Ian (A) What is the status of these drives in CMOS setup. Are they installed and typed properly? From what you write, I'd guess that after replacing the battery you missed reinstalling the B: drive in CMOS (it's not autodetected) and that your hard drive has the the wrong parameters. Did you recover the hard drive parameters with an Autodetect funtion, or did you have the numbers written somewhere. At any rate, minor differences between the original drive parameters and a new set will produce such a creeping failure as you described, but if you catch it that late, even restoring the right parameters and running Scandisk or Nortons may not bail you out, and you may need to reformat. I've also seen a cocked hard drive cable cause creeping failure, again rare, and always unrecoverable. Morris 3/20/98(Q) I actually want to buy a 9 GB disk drive and I find it quite confusing. Which are the differences between SCSI, SCSI 2, SCSI 3, internal narrow SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultrawide SCSI etc.? Eric (A) In short, SCSI-1 maxed out a 5MB/s transfer rate, SCSI-2, also called Fast SCSI, can reach 10MB/s in the "narrow" implementation, "20MB/s" in "wide". SCSI-3, also called Ultra SCSI, does 20MB/s in "narrow", 40MB/s in "wide", 40MB/s as Ultra 2 (second version of Ultra), 80MB/s as Ultra 2 "wide", 80MB/s as Ultra 3 (third version of Ultra), and 160 MB/s as Ultra 3 "wide". All of these are maximum bus transfer rates that you'll get nowhere near in a home PC. Narrow means an 8-bit data path, Wide means a 16bit data path (double the bandwidth). Wide also supports twice as many devices. For the best descriotion of all the I/O buses I've ever seen (from Adaptec), goto http://www.adaptec.com/products/guide/ioposter.html Morris 3/5/98(Q) I am in the process of upgrading a 286 to a 386 for a friend. My question is how to switch drives so that the A (5 1/4 floppy), who thinks its boss will concede to the (3.5) B drive and let it be boss. In essence how do you switch drive 'a' to 'b' or vice versa. John (A) It's a two step process, unless the drives are really ancient and are hard jumpered with an address (very rare). The first step is to just reverse the order of the drives on the cable when you build the 386. The drive at the end of the cable (after the twist) is automatically selected as the A: drive, the drive in the middle is the B:. Foppy cables all come with 5 connectors to allow for every possible combination of the two types. The second step is to enter the CMOS Setup for the 386 and set the A: drive to 1.44MB and the B: to 1.2MB. Otherwise, the drives will seek and attempt to read, but the BIOS will have the wrong number of sectors in mind and errors will result. Morris 2/13/98(Q) I have two 486-66 machines, one VLB type, one regular. The VLB machine has two hard drives - both work fine. The slave drive is 120 MB and I have a 430 MB I want to replace it with. The 430 MB is left over from upgrading my Pentium. I put the 430 MB drive in my regular machine to check it out and it ran OK as a slave drive.When I tried it in the VLB machine it won't recognize it. I set the CMOS correctly, the cables I'm using are just disconnected from the 120 MB slave drive that's in there and reconnected to the 430 MB drive. But I boot the machine and get the dreaded 'hard drive controller error-press F1 to continue'. I press F1 and the first drive works OK. I try the drive on my regular machine again and it works OK. Robert (A) It may be the jumpers on the master suited the 120MB slave, but not the 430 MB. Some masters have different settings for ATA compliant slaves and non-compliant ones, along with a few other options which determine how a couple of signal lines are used to check the slave status. Some newer drives use the DASP (Drive Active/Slave Present) jumper set on the Master. I would check the web site of the Master drive manufacturer for all the details you can get on the jumpers, or just try the 430MB as Master and the old master as slave. Morris 2/12/98(Q) I recently bought an HP OfficeJet Printer/Fax/Scanner unit, which I connected to my 386SX PC running Windows 3.11. I have 8MB RAM and a 120MB hard drive. The printer takes up to five minutes to print a document, and recently I began getting "Out of space" errors and it wouldn't print at all. HP suggested that I change to "lowest quality" printing, but nothing helped. Dave (A) The "Out of space" error (as correspondance showed), was do to a large number of lost allocation units on the hard drive, probably due to turning the PC off in Windows when the print jobs seemed stuck. SCANDISK, or FDISK/F, fixed that problem, but the printer remained slow. It turns out that the Win 3.1 driver software for the OfficeJet overpowers slower PCs, the only possible fix would be running a compatible "dumb" driver, if any exist. So, old PC owners, beware of buying components whose software is overkill for your system. Morris 1/26/98(Q) I gave a working 386 clone to a friend over a year ago to use for word processing. She has finally gotten around to starting it up but now it won't work properly. Firstly the CMOS battery doesn't seem to be working, however I've managed to reset the CMOS settings. I can get it to the C: prompt by bypassing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files and I can do "dir" and "type" but "edit" freezes the computer. The floppy drive isn't working properly. It will come up with a drive error message if I try to execute a command other than "dir" and it won't boot from the drive even though the lights come on. It will go as far as the splash screen in Win 3.1 and go into dosshell but then freezes. At the moment I've left it running, sitting at the C: prompt hoping to recharge the battery. Susan (A) It actually sounds like you have one of the drive parameters set wrong. Often times, if you get them "close enough", the system tracks, which are right at the front of the drive, are "lined up" correctly, but as everything after the first few hundred KB is out of whack. Try to avoid actually writing anything to the disk until confirming (via software diagnostics or sticking the drive temporarily in a newer system that feature s"Auto Detect Hard drive) that you have the drive parameters correct. The ones printed on the drive label aren't necessarily the ones used at build time. The floppy problem sounds like the sme thing, DIR will usually work whatever type of floppy drive is selected, but it won't get through boot. (Turned out to be an external cache failure - something that's on our "Always Check" list). Morris 12/29/97(Q) The system is a 486DX tower PC, with 8MB RAM, almost 2Gig harddrive, topping at 133MHz, & running WIN95. Also included is a single 1.44MB floppy (A:\) & multiple CD-drive (D:\, E:\, F:\, G:\, & H:\) For an unknown reason, the system does not load WIN95 and doesn't recognize the harddrive (C:\). When system is started the following displays: "American Megatrends logo info (BIOS firm, I believe), 7808KB OK,
After pressing F1, the following messages appear:
We are at a loss as to why this occurs. In the course of "trouble shooting," I did replace the internal battery. The only other consideration is that there isn't enough RAM to support WIN95? Before locking up, I was able to do a thorough SCANDISK on C:\. SCANDISK reported zero errors. The harddrive was also defragged. These areas appear to be OK. This was done with WIN95 & the bootdisk when C: msyteriously came back. After multiple restarts, the problem seemed to resolve itself mysteriously this morning. However, using different shut-down scenarios, I was finally able to replicate this again. The HDC error occurred when an application was open & WIN95 was improperly shutdown. Now, after replacing the internal battery, this error occurs continuosly. As well, a new dimension has been added. A message alerts me that a file is missing or corrupted. I think this error is related to the change in CMOS settings as a result of the new battery. I only updated the time & date within CMOS. Johnathan (A) Keep in mind that I'm not there, so this is a educated guess, but it sounds to me like you have a hardware gremlin which is complicating your troubleshooting efforts. Another way to put it is I don't see any relationship between the steps you took and the problem, so I'm betting your failure is actually random. I've been led down the garden path many times by random failures that seemed to respond to my "fixes", so don't feel bad. For example, replacing the onboard battery can't have any effect on the "Primary HDC failure", a BIOS error which doesn't care whether you have the type right, the drive formatted, or anythiing else outside of hooked up properly. To make a long story short, you either have a bad controller (most likely), a conflict with other drives on the IDE cable which can be easily troubleshot by removing them all (medium likely), an initialization conflict due to another card, normally video (fairly unlikely), or a failing hard drive (unlikely). Good luck, and a good question to illustrate a troubleshooting point. Morris 11/25/97(A) I am still working on that upgrade from 486DX2 to an Intel motherboard w/Pentium 166MHz. CPU. My new system boots up to the point where it says FLOPPY DRIVE FAILURE (40) Could you help me with this one. My friend is beginning to wonder if he did the right thing on letting me upgrade his computer. I order your new book from Amazon online Monday night and recieved it Thursday morning. Haven't been able to put it down, very interesting and in language that's user friendly. Beverly (A) Thanks for buying the book! (Also the opportunity to get a plug in). Your e-mail subject line says "CD-ROM light stays on", did you mean "Floppy light"? The first thing I'd do is make sure the ribbon cable is on right at the floppy drive. Don't settle for squinting at it, take the drive out of the case and make sure the connector hasn't bent a couple pins out of the way at one end. If the floppy light is stuck on , the reason is almost always a backwards or miss-aligned cable. Morris 11/21/97(Q) My mom upgraded and after some sittin' around time gave me a i486-dx33 on a 1993 AMI board. I have tried 5 I/O cards two F.D's and 2 H.D.'s in addition to a variety of peripherals. I invariably get HDD controller failure, or FDD controller failure depending on what is hooked up. I have wandered thru setup countless times. It WILL format the hard drive and auto recognize it as type 47 with all it's findings correct. I believe this is an I/O card problem but with having tried so many one of which was on this board and fully functional under my moms ownership, and another being a bare bones 4 jumper idiot proof type, I have no idea what 2 do next. Anon Boy, that's a lot of I/O cards. I'm assuming that you mean SIDE cards, and I'm wondering where you got them from. The last place I was set up, I had at least 20 SIDE cards around that would produce exactly the problem that you have, all bad from field repairs that I never threw out ,on the off chance I'd get enough of the same kind together to make it worth trying to return them to the wholesaler. Setup has no effect on whether or not you get those errors, it's strictly a hardware issue. If you get FDD error on boot, you'll never get a floppy going because the system doesn't believe there is a working floppy/controller installed, the same goes for the HDD. It sound to me like you need to go back to ground zero, set up ypur system with nothing but a video card and a single floppy drive (no hard drive installed in Setup), than go through your whole stock of SIDE cards, labeling those which give you and FDD controller failure. Assuming one or more cards makes it past the floppy drive test, add the hard drive that you previously suceeded formatting (from Setup? that's not a good idea), and see if you can get to a no error situation. I'm not talking about DOS errors like "Missing Operating System", just try to get past that "FDD/HDD Controller Failure". If all the cards appear to be bad, try the other floppy drive or hard drive, and repeat the whole procedure. If all the cards are STILL bad, and none of them were new, I would spend $15 on a new card before giving up on the motherboard or other parts. Morris 10/29/97(Q) I just purchased a used Gateway 2000 75Mz Pentium motherboard/CPU that I intended to replace an aging 386DX40 motherboard. My old system had 2 old style (MFM/RLL?) 40MB Seagate drives and a 3.5in diskette. The disk controller for these were from an even older original IBM AT configuration. My question is can I use (at least for a while) these older hard drives and controller on the Pentium motherboard? The CMOS settings only mention IDE drive configurations and I have been unsuccessful at booting off the old drives. Also, can MFM drives ever exist with newer IDE drives? Your Web site seems to ignore discussions of this type of upgrade problem. Fred (A) You're right that I ignore it, since there hasn't been an MFM drive manufactured that is still within it's factory estimated lifetime, I didn't see the point of confusing everybody who will never see one. My first suggestion would be to buy a brand new 1GB IDE drive for $100. As to getting the MFM's going, you would have to dissable the onboard IDE controller on the Gateway in Setup or with a motherboard jumper, then run the drives off the the old controller. Whether or not the Gateway BIOS will allow you to insert the drive parameters for an MFM drive with it's onboard IDE dissabled, I don't know, never having tried. The old controller likely has an onboard BIOS that may require you dissable upper memory mapping, bios relocation, etc... Morris 10/13/97(Q) I installed a Zip internal drive and it and it seemed to work for a few weeks. It turns out that any new information written to any disks corrupts the information on the disk. The disks won't read on the Zip at work either. The Zip seems to be going thru the motions but it is writing bad stuff. I had him reinstalled the software for the drive but new disls are still NG. I bought the drive at a computer show and it doesn't come back to town for a few weeks. Ralph (A) I have very limited experience with ZIP drives, but if it were a floppy, I would say the drive is bad. It should be under manufacturers warantee, regardless, and I would check their website - the company is Iomega. (A bad drive turned out to be the correct diagnosis). Morris 10/6/97(Q) I successfully installed a 1.7G harddrive in a WIN3.1-running 486DX66, with the very-much-appreciated help of the HMDPC. But the harddrive, from an internet "auction" house, had not come with software (or instructions); so I was happy to just be able to get the first 504MB going. That computer has since been upgraded to WIN95, but the computer still only sees part of the hard drive, and "Partition Magic" doesn't seem to see more either. Is there a way to reclaim all that wonderful wasted space? Ellie (A) I'm not familiar with "Partition Magic", what you need is some drive overlay software, often a branded version of ONTRACK. The first place to look for such software is the manufacturers web site. Overlay software cures both DOS and BIOS limitations, so you should be able to get it to work with Windows 3.1 or 95. However, you have to follow instructions strictly. For example, ONTRACK informs users to dissable any advanced BIOS drive management features, like LBA, or cylinder counts over 1024. The overlay software takes care of EVERYTHING. Now, I hear there are some specialty software packages floating around that allow you to repartion and format drives WITHOUT having to backup and re-install your software, but I've yet to see one. Morris 10/5/97(Q) I have a situation where where the MBRs on two hard disks on a system I received and am trying to make usable are corrupted. FDISK and FORMAT do not work. Your manual indicated that a factory low level or rescue formatter could be used. Is there a commercially available product that you would recommend that could perform this operation? Bob Well, Norton Disk Doctor can fix most problems, as can Ontrack Utilities, but the factory formatters are free, and you can normally get them off the web site of the hard rive manufacturer. They talk directly with hardware (ignoring anything written on the disk), and low level format it according to the drive type you specify. If you go with the commercial software, Nortons can write a generic MBR, or copy an MBR from a good drive, but I'm not sure it can do this in the worst cases, while I've never seen a factory formatter fail. Morris 9/21/97(Q) Can you put a SCSI Hard Drive in a system with a EIDE Hard Drive? I'm putting a controller card #7197 WD on a new system and would like to use my old Hard Drive with the SCSI HD I bought. John (A) You can certainly put the two types of hard drives in the system, on their own controllers. Either make the EIDE the boot drive and give the SCSI drive an ID=1 or greater, or put the EIDE on the secondary EIDE controller (non-bootable), and put the SCSI drive on ID=0. The former I've done, the latter should work, but I've never tried it. Morris 9/4/97(Q) The hard drive in my notebook computer failed, with 18 months worth of work on it. It was supposed to be backed up automatically when attached to my office network, but this has sadly proved not to be the case. The notebook manufacturer, who has repaired the system (under warranty) with a new drive, offered to have my data retreived for $700. Is this a reasonable price, and do you think the data will be recoverable? Jim (A) Data on dead hard drives is normally recoverable, provided there hasn't been a serious "head crash", where the heads physically come in contact with the platters and ruin the magnetic coating. Such crashes are pretty rare, the normal failure mechanism for a hard drive is simply an electonic problem with the interface or motor controller, or a mechanical failure. The $700 quoted sounds like a median price to me, depending on drive capacity. The price usually covers the worse case scenario, where the platters are removed from your drive in a clean room and remounted in a universal jig, or a skeleton drive of the same make, to be read. Morris 9/3/97(Q) I have a clone 486DX66Mhz with a Maxtor 340Mb hard disk. Recently, I've been having trouble booting it up the first time I turn it on (cold boot). It sounds like its spinning, then it sounds like it halts altogether and I get a "Controller card failure" message. I have replaced the controller card (which is a EIDE controller card) with a new one from the manufacturer, as it still was under warranty. It has made no difference. (The floppy drive has also been replaced, as the old one was destroying the data on my floppies). When I hit the reset button, it'll boot up just fine, although not always on first retry. When it doesn't boot up, I always get the "Controller card failure" message, even with the brand new controller card. Is the hard drive ready to give out? Maria (A) I'm not sure. What you describe does ressemble what happens with older hard drives when the permanent lubrication starts failing, so it takes them longer to come up to speed. The drive will announce itself as "not ready" until it is fully spun up, and this error is often reported as a contoller card failure, or the old HDD/FDD controller failure. The real test would be to run it for a couple hours, power down, wait a couple minutes, and power up again. The drive is still "hot" under these conditions, so it should spin right up. If you still get the error, there's a good chance that it's related to some conflict or developing failure on the I/O bus. Morris 8/25/97(Q) I am working on a 486DX trying to get a SCSI Hard Drive installed. But whenever my SCSI card is inserted, my floppy drive doesn't work properly. It spins up like it's working, but then gives me the "Not reading drive A" error. When the SCSI card is removed, then the floppy works fine. What gives? Scott (A) Most SCSI cards have a floppy contoller on board, which conflicts with the standard floppy controller. There is usually a floppy connector on the SCSI card and a jumper or switch to disable it. (In this case, it turned out to be an Adaptec AHA-2842A card, switch 5 dissabled the floppy interface, the same as on many other Adaptec controllers). Morris 8/24/97The following is information, supplied by a reader, is from the Microsoft web site, and answers a commonly asked question. Direct link to donloadable shown in yellow. http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/info/dskts.htmisk Disk Type Specific Drive For Windows 95 dsktsupd.exe (Download: 114K, self-extracting Zip file, published: June 27th, 1996) This update resolves a problem in Windows 95 which may, in certain specific configurations, lead to corrupted data on extended partitions on large IDE drives. This problem may arise if all of the below conditions are true:
Under these conditions, the contents of logical drives in the extended partition may appear incorrect or corrupted. If these logical drives are written to under this condition, information may be written incorrectly to these drives, resulting in data corruption. Users of computers with large IDE hard disks (greater than 504mb), partitioned into multiple logical drives, with a system BIOS that supports extended INT13 functions, should obtain this update. The above is quoted from a Microsoft Technical support document, Copyright by Microsoft For the regular Microsoft Windows 95 Updates page, (including the memory leak fix) http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/info/system-updates.htm Morris 8/6/97(Q) I have a 486DX2 clone. I have an unusual problem with my floppy drive that I can't seem to pin down. I am running the drives and modem off of a DTC2278-E Vesa Enhanced IDE controller card. The floppy will read, install software etc. But when I try to copy a file to the drive, it doesn't write. The drive seems to be functioning properly, it even runs and sounds like it's writing. Any suggestions. I have run WinProbe diagnostics and WinTune and they both find the drive, but can't write to it. Rosie (A) First step is to try another drive, since the most obvious problem would be no write current. If that doesn't fix the problem, it would fall into the same sort of category as floppy drives that will read the first disk inserted after boot, than refuse to forget what is on it, even though when instructed to do a directory on a new disk. The drive will go through the motions, than report back with the directory from the first disk. You could try the contoller, since VESA IDE controllers are highly problematical, but my bet in these "weird" cases would be on the motherboard. It also can't hurt to temporarily turn off cache memory (both internal and external) and run out of turbo, just to see if the problem goes away. Morris (added on 8/14 - a reader writes to suggest that pin 34 on the cable is always responsible. Of course, it still depends on the hardware at either end of the wire.) 8/5/97(Q) Here's the problem I'm facing: I formatted the hard disk of my old Goldstar 286 with the command "FORMAT C:" and ever since the Goldstar has renounced its hard disk. I cannot see the "C:\>" and when I attempt to execute FDISK (isn't that what I am supposed to do?) through a floppy, the message "Incorrect version of MS-DOS" is displayed. What must I do to have a prompt again? What files must be included in the floppy along with FDISK? From what version of MS-DOS (The version that was runnning on the system was 3.20(?) or 3.02(?)) Costas (A) First, when formatting a hard disk, you should always use "FORMAT C: /S". The "/S" makes it a system disk, without wihich it will be unbootable. You can still force it to be a system disk by using the "SYS" command from a floppy, as in "SYS C::, but first you need to get a bootable floppy with the correct versions of "SYS" and "FDISK" on it. The DOS version currently on your hard drive is pretty unimportant, since you are redoing it anyway, the important thing is that when you create a boot floppy (using "FORMAT A:/S") on a working system, you get FORMAT and FDISK from the same system. DOS file versions must agree with the COMMAND.COM that boots. Try to get DOS 5.0 or higher going, and you'll be a lot happier in the long run. The basic procedure with the proper files on your boot floppy is,
If you can scare up an official set of DOS 5.0 or higher Disks, the whole process is automatic. Morris 7/29/97(Q) I have a 486 DX4 100MHZ machine, I attempted to transfer a 212MB Conner hard drive on this system. It took several tries before I could get anything on the monitor, then I accidentally pulled power connector out of the hard drive which created a spark. Now the hard drive will not boot up at all. There is no activity what so ever on the hard drive. This hard drive is run on a IDE controller card of which the hard drive indicator light is attached. When I try to boot up the hard drive the indicator light comes on sometimes ( I believe the infrequency of the light is due to how I attach the interface cables). From my description do you believe there is a problem with my power supply? Do I need a new IDE controller card? The pins on my controller card are somewhat bent but I can still attach the interface cables could this be a problem? How durable are the grey interface cables could I be in need of new ones? Do I need a new hard drive? Anon (A) Ouch. It sounds like the hard drive may be cooked. With the hard drive power plugged in, and the connector not plugged in, pick the drive up and gently tilt it from side to side. If the drive is spun up, you will feel resistance to the tilting, since the spinning disks act as a gyroscope. If the drive is spinning up, there's still a good chance that the electronics are gone, but you won't know if the problem is the drive or controller unless you replace one or the other. IDE cables are pretty sturdy, and plugging them in backwards usually won't hurt either the drive or the controller. If the cable is failing, you should be able to see that the connector is falling off. Bent pins are OK as long as you get them in the right holes. As long as you can get the computer to boot without the hard drive (anything on the screen) the power supply is probably OK. Try switching the lead with your floppy or CD if you aren't sure. Morris 7/13/97(Q) i don't know if you can help me but...3 1/2" floppy problem: when installing a program from floppies the drive will see and be able to read disk 1 of a set, but when putting in a disk 2 the drive does not see it, saying along the lines of "wrong disk insert disk 2". if you look at the directory of that disk 2, it displays what was on disk 1. After checking various disks, i realized it was'nt the disks but my drive or my configuration. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Anon (A) I've come across the exact same problem a couple times in the past, and it's never been the drive or the controller. I've generally managed a partial fix (to get a particular set of floppies loaded), by trying the following cripple mode options.
In other words, the actual hangup is a logic/memory problem. The system usually spins up the floppy, and the information is probably passed to the controller, but either the area of RAM which holds the floppies FAT, or the cache for it (internal or external), never gets re-written. Morris 7/6/97(Q) I have been trying to find out if there is a diagnostic utility which will provide you with the data rate transfer for a floppy contoller (500KB/Sec, 1MB/sec, etc.). Most tape drive backup units which use the floppy controller say that they need a 1 MB/sec data transfer rate. Allan (A) I've never seen a tape backup unit of this type that wouldn't operate on a given floppy controller, but the performance ALWAYS stinks. If you can afford any other type of tape drive, go for it. Morris (Q) Thanks for the quick response. I am tempted to ask if the performance is THAT bad, then why do they make them??? The external, go through the parallel port models don't seem to perform much better (indeed there are installation issues with those). What's a broke computer user to do??? Allan (A) The reason they make these terrible performance drives is that it's the cheapest way to get an internal drive interfaced. The best drives are SCSI, but that costs both for the drive electronics and the controller. Proprietary contollers, on the other hand, can dohardware compression on the fly, but they are even more expensive than SCSI controllers, and the performance gain means less on todays fast Pentiums. By the way, while a broke computer user is stuck, one with $150 in his pocket should look seriously at the entry-level removeable media drives from Syquest and Iomega. Hard drive performance, cartridges from 100MB to 1.0GB, transparent access. Morris |