286 system

I know way old but it one of the machines at a macnic use to test car computers. Frist one is they have a hard drive that 635megs 16 heads and cyl 1225. And not working. And the computer only sees 270 megs 16 head and cyl 1024. How did they get this hard drive to work. And I m thinking they use one type of setting and then overload hit it and then rest to some thing differnt how do you find out.
The cmos is loading up but no hard drive or diskdrive. I would tell him to upgrade problem is the computer uses 8/16 isa slots. What year did they drop that? Computer age is 1985 I know OUCH Way Old. 16mhz. LOL

did the computer see ful 635 MB right from the begining? i doubt since in the 286 times (and even some 386 and earlier 486) the max capacity of the hard disk was 528 MB, as 63 sec, 16 heads, 1024 cyl. then came the large and LBA modes with full 24 bit addressing that could address as muchas 8.4 GB for later 486s and early Pentiums. These days 28 bit addressing is used so that the BIOS can address as much as 137 GB of single disk.

maybe the hard disk is damaged, since it should have shown at least 528 MB! If it can be done, set the drive parameters manually to check whether it supports that size.

girish

<font color=red>Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are Ingenious!</font color=red>

Hello again
Well the drive when on making a louder the reg drive like a click click click. And no it don’t boot in drive anymore. I hooked it to my amd athlon system as a secondary. But it would not detect it. I just know what the drive is. Not what on it. The Bios says Western Digital. and the form factor is LPT computer

What makes this hard is the company that built this Lpt machine had a tech come out and look at it. And he might have change the setting to the hard drive. It was on the first settings. And there 100 different settings 1 to 45 then custom settings.

And what is Bull is they want $1,200 to repair the hard drive. WRONG. I m going to talk to the machinic Monday and tell him to give me the name and phone number to the company get the software and buy the guys computer down the street which is a 486. And put the card in there with the hard drive that works.