response 1 of 34:

Jul 21 16:58 UTC 1996

I'm not certain, but as a non-geek i might try installing the WD as the
primary and moving the Conner to the slave.  Also, check which connections
onto the cable you're using for each.  Don't know if that makes a diff.

response 3 of 34:

Jul 21 18:52 UTC 1996

Thank you both for your attemp to help with the problem.  Since this morning
I found an installation manual for the Western Digital drive.  According to
the manual there is a limit in BIOS which may be overcome using the software
that Western Digital supplies called "Ontrack Disk Manager" which since I
purchased this drive from someone who got it as a warranty replacement, I do
not have.  I tried the WD bulletin board to download the file but it was not
available there.

Does anyone know where I might be able to obtain a copy of this locally?

response 5 of 34:

Jul 22 02:59 UTC 1996

Disk Manager, last I checked, cost money, so it wouldn't be available for
download.  It's included with hard drives, too, but the hard drive makers
pay OnTrack for the licensing of that software.

response 7 of 34:

Jul 22 06:48 UTC 1996

gee, all the stty sttinegs went screwqy

response 9 of 34:

Jul 22 11:19 UTC 1996

Disk Mangler came with my 1.2G Western Digital HD.  The BIOS on my
486DX-66 didn't recognize the entire 1.2G drive either.  (It's a PC
so I don't expect things to work very well.)  With Disk Mangler I
was able to format the whole 1.2G and it's behaving just fine now.
I'd prefer not to use On Track Disk Manager but it works.
 
Charles, what does Disk Manager do to hose hard drives?  It worked
on may system, so far...?

Fred, I'd be happy to provide you with a copy of D.M. since your
trying to install a Western Digital HD and D.M. comes with W.D. HDs.

response 11 of 34:

Jul 24 10:21 UTC 1996

question from above when the editor crapped ... do you have a type 47 or
tye 48 in your bios table? that's how custom hardrives seem to be
registered with the system. 

response 13 of 34:

Jul 26 03:14 UTC 1996

The only other nuisance I've found with Disk Manager type software is that
it makes booting from a floppy more complicated.  If you just turn on the
machine with a floppy in the drive, you'll find it impossible to access
the hard drive.  Most software has a way around this -- the kind I'm
familiar with has you hold down Ctrl during bootup, then it asks you to
put in the floppy and hit Enter.  It works, it just adds another step.

response 15 of 34:

Jul 26 16:23 UTC 1996

I'll have to get back to you on that Fred.  Said machine is currently not
accessible since it's at home and I'm not ;-)

response 17 of 34:

Jul 27 02:33 UTC 1996

I've heard of people using EPROM programmers to burn their own modified
BIOS, too, but you'd have to be good at assembly language and
bit-twiddling. ;)

response 19 of 34:

Jul 27 09:32 UTC 1996

I ran CHKDSK on the the system in question and it reported that my 1.2G
D.M.'d hard drive has total disk space of just under 1.1G.  I also ran
SCANDISK which found some lost clusters, or somesuch, which I had it fix.
The system came up just fine after the "repair" when I rebooted it.  I
though SCANDISK might destroy parts of whatever Disk Manager had done
and not allow the system to reboot.  This was *not* the case.  So far I'm
happy with DM the way it is and doubt that I'll toss $85 into a 486DX 
mother board that only cost me $100 with the CPU half a year ago.

response 21 of 34:

Jul 28 02:00 UTC 1996

There are a bunch of different things that contribute to a limited hard drive
size under DOS.

Mainly, a bios will autodetect or accept any values for Cylenders, Heads, and
Sectors that either you or the hard drive tells it.  A large hard drive, like
a 1024MB, might have drive geometry like 2048C, 16H, 64S.  You can put that
into the bios, and it will work, and you will even be able to run stuff like
linux with no problems.
 
unfortunately, DOS has a built-in limit of 1024C, which has never been fixed.
So, 1024c x 16h x 64s x 512 bytes in a block = 540 MB reported by fdisk.
 
to get around that, the bios must support LBA mode.  (the normal mode is
called CHS, by the way, for cyl head sector)  LBA mode has the BIOS re-map
the drive, actually mis-reporting it to DOS, so that it will work.  So, the
1024MB drive, if you looked at the HD geometry FROM DOS, would be reported
as 1024c, 32h, 64s.  All it does is divide the cyls by two until C<=1024, and
multiplies h to compensate.
 
ontrack disk-manager, and the programs of the same sort, are basically DOS
TSR's which do the same thing.  I agree that they should be avoided, even
though I used one myself for a while.

Some BIOSes that do support LBA mode have it shut off by default, so you might
want to poke around in your own BIOS setup screen to see if you can activate
it if you need it.  My current motherboard was like that.

FLASH EEPROM is REALLY nice, especially when there is a bug in their BIOS.
I was working with some motherboards that had a bug in the secondary IDE
detection:  when you had a drive on the 2ndary ide, it would expect to find
both a master AND a slave on that channel, so the boot sequence was delayed
by approx. 2 minutes for the thing to time-out. 

I haven't had many problems with plug-and-play, either, at least from the
hardware standpoint.  the most important thing I found to do was to make sure
you tell the BIOS which IRQ's are in use by your ISA cards so the PNP cards
don't try to take those!  

response 23 of 34:

Jul 31 03:47 UTC 1996

On the other hand, I know of a guy who accidentally wiped out the entire
first track of his hard drive with a low-level formatter.  The only reason
he was able to recover is that he'd used a Disk Mangler type program,
which was the only thing that had been occupying that track.  Once he'd
re-installed Disk Mangler from floppy, the drive was readable again.