I'm having a problem installing a Western Digital Caviar hard drive as a slave
to my Conner 420MB drive.  The WDC is an 850MB drive which my Bios only sees
as 800MB and DOS & Windows 95 see only as 504MB.  Is this a limitation with
DOS 6.2 or is there a problem elsewhere?

34 responses total.

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.

I'd try partitioning the WDC into two logical drives, like 350 & 500 or
425 & 425 or whatever.  The smaller sized partitions will use space more
efficiently anyway (unless you use a Stacker-style compression program,
or the ultra-recent Win95 replacement file system).  I'm not sure if you
hit a DOS limit, but using even the old Win95 file system, you could make
an 850 meg partition (you just wouldn't want to, generally).

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?

I would *strongly* recommend you *not* use the Disk Mangler, I mean disk
Manager software.  Get a controller card from a company called Promise which
has a bios update for the disk on it.  *Much* better solution.  Cost $39. 
I can't cound on both hands the **cked up disks I've seen resulting from Disk
Manager software.

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.

ummmm, when you do yoru 

gee, all the stty sttinegs went screwqy

forget it

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.

Well, for one thing, you'll find it impossible to read any hard drive with
Linux that isn't recognized by the BIOS.  This includes drives 'tweaked'
with Disk Manager type software. :P

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. 

I guess I don't need to worry about DM since I don't do Linux.  Any thing
else?
 
I found that the auto HD detect built into my systems setup did detect
the 1.2G drive.  However, when I ran FDISK, that only recognized about
540M.

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.

Hey - My Bios does recognize the HDD as more than 504MB.  It just does not
see it as it's full capacity of 853MB (actually the WD manual shows it's CMOS
capacity as 814.1MB and CHKDSK capacity as 853.6MB).  So if one were to
believe the manual the problem is linked more to the way DOS handles the HDD.

Klaus - I may take you up on your offer on the Otrack Disk Manager.  When you
run CHKDSK, SCANDISK or use the Drivespace program on Windows '95, what
capacity does your HDD show?

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 ;-)

There's a company out there that specializes in BIOS upgrades... I got mine
done for about $85, and it had good directions and everything.  That will very
likely solve any EIDE problems, and might well give you Plug'n'Pray as well.

mail me and I'll find the address.

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. ;)

Heh, "Plug'n'Pray," I hadn't heard that one before.  Excellently appropriate.

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.

Re: 17:  This was a company where I told them all my BIOS bootup version
numbers, etc., and they sent me the latest from the same company.  In my case,
on a 2.5 year old 486 MB, I received a disk with a Flash EEPROM upgrade. 
After it was done I had EIDE recognition and some other new features as well.

I hate Plug'n'Play.  I'd rather choose all the settings myself than trust the
PC to know what I want, esp. if I'm using some bizarre multi-port serial card
with custom software.

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!  

Disk manager software is often specific to the drive or manufacturer so be
careful.  
What is does is store a translation driver in track 0 and effectively move
all the remaining tracks over one.  track 1 is now track 0, etc.  The problem
is that if there is any problem at all on your hard drive during bootup, you
will lose all the data on your HD unless your mangler has a floppy useable
version to make an emergency boot floppy.  
It sure would be a tragedy to lose 1 GB of data because an errant program or
a virus wrote *1* byte into your master boot record.  If your media descriptor
byte gets changed.  All data is gone.  
My brother nearly suffered this fate, but was luck enough to have the 1.6 GB
disk mangler drive as slave to a 200 MB normal drive.  Once I revived the
first drive, the second came right back up.  All becuase of an invalid media
byte.
So, mangle if you want, but be sure to keep a current backup, and a copy of
the mangler driver...

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.

Thank you all for your help and comments.  This past week I called Western
Digital and they advised that I use their EZ Drive software which I downloaded
off of their bulletin board.  The drive in question is now working with its
maximum capacity, partitioned with Partition Magic.  I've moved quite a few
directories over to it and everything looks/works normal. 

The only question now is whether or not I'll be able to compress it.

You probably *could* compress it, but nobody I've talked to who's used
disk compression has been happy with it.

you never talked to me ... i LUV drvspace ... it's jsut another algorithm.
  
i would not suggest asking for a standard of 3:1, but 1.5-2.0 isn't
all that terrible. if you are really stuffing binaries on the HD, maybe
stay back at teh 1.5 level.

'Course one bad byte in your compressed volume could lose you all the data
in the file instead of just one file.  I see that several times a week.  :(

that's why there is spinrite ... use it abut every 2-3 months, just
because. for a hd that is in 8+ hrs/day usage, maybe every month.

SpinRite is great stuff.  :)

and/or  after moving a hd from one locale to another ...RealCheap
insurance.

I was just having trouble getting my 200MB Conner to recognize as slave to
my Fujitsu 1GB with my new motherboard.  It would only see the 200 from a
powerup.  Any other kind of start and it would fail.  I ended up moving the
drive (200) to master of the second IDE chain.  Works just great now.  It was
a bit of a hassle getting linux back to normal since the drive had moved.

Conner 210 drives have claimed several hours of my free time coming to the
realization that they just do not like other drive manufacturers. I have twin
210 drives that work great together or singly but mess up everything when
placed with other dirves.

No further problems with mine.  I'm looking (very casually) for a drive to
add to my system.  Bigger than 200, but small and prolly used.  I want more
room to play with my linux stuff.

Connor drives use a different jumper standard than any other IDE drive.
You're right, they don't mix with other drives well.

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