Subject: Quantum Lightning 540 AT Hard Disk

From: Roger Bisson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 29 07:02:01 2003

I have an old Quantum Lightning 540 AT hard disk
containing some data I want to retrieve. The drive
itself was removed from a computer some years ago
(about 7 or 8 years), working as far as I remember.

However, now, having tried to install the drive in a
more modern machine to archive the data to CDR, the
drive while recognized by the machine and the drive
itself spinning up and apparently working returns a
"hard disk read failure" error.

Trawling the web, I found a short thread entitled "HD
repair techniques" on cctalk. Like the original author
of this thread, I too have a drive that contains data
that is perhaps not worth the hundreds of pounds (GBP)
that professional data recovery entails but wouldn't
mind recovering the data all the same.

Can anybody point me in the direction of any good
information regarding the testing/diagnosis/repair of
head-disk-assembly problems?

Roger

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From: Huw Davies <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 29 07:26:01 2003

> head-disk-assembly problems?

I've had some success using the old "place the drive in a sealed plastic
bag and refridgerate for a couple of hours" trick.

No guarantees though!
-- 
Huw Davies           | e-mail: [email-masked] 
Melbourne            | "If soccer was meant to be played in the 
Australia            | air, the sky would be painted green"

---

From: "TeoZ" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 29 12:01:55 2003

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Huw Davies" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 8:23 AM
Subject: Re: Quantum Lightning 540 AT Hard Disk

> bag and refridgerate for a couple of hours" trick.

Wasnt there a problem in the old days of IDE on pc's where a drive formatted
on one controller had to be reformatted on a different brand controller to
work? Also was the HD formatted with one of those programs that allowed
larger drives to work with systems that couldnt normally use them? Were you
using stacker or some other compression software on this hd?

The oldest IDE drive I have thats being used at all is a 500mb conner drive,
and it spins up and works fine on newer hardware. Make sure you using auto
detect in the bios or try changing the method your machine uses to read the
drive (LBA, 32 bit access, pio modes etc)

---

From: Fred Cisin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 29 14:43:00 2003

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, TeoZ wrote:
> work?

That was the case with ST506/412 interface drives on the XT.
On the AT, the controllers were almost standardized.
Most of the young whippersnappers who think that the AT was
the first computer, have never encountered that problem.
Sometimes, the incompatibility was as trivial as one controller
was formatting sectors numbered 0 - 16, while another was 1-17.

And with an IDE drive, the "controller" is part of the drive
assembly - the board in the computer is an interface card,
not a controller.  (the board in the computer doesn't make
any of the choices of formatting parameters)

> Also was the HD formatted with one of those programs that allowed

What is the exact wording of the message?  Who is coming up with
the error (DOS?, BIOS?)
If the drive is being recognized, but gives the error when trying
to boot, or doing a DIR, then the problem may be just a few bad
sectors, and be a totally different problem than being completely
unable to read any part of the drive at all.

> drive (LBA, 32 bit access, pio modes etc)

Didn't some of the earliest IDE drives not support "auto-detect"?
But surely a 540AT would be too new for that.  Nevertheless, it
might not hurt to manually put in the parameters for the drive.
What are they for that drive?

Can we assume that the machine will boot from floppy?
If so, can the diagnostics of Speedstor see the drive properly?

---

From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 29 17:41:00 2003

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Roger Bisson wrote:

> I have an old Quantum Lightning 540 AT hard disk containing some data I
> want to retrieve. The drive itself was removed from a computer some
> years ago (about 7 or 8 years), working as far as I remember.
>
> However, now, having tried to install the drive in a more modern machine
> to archive the data to CDR, the drive while recognized by the machine
> and the drive itself spinning up and apparently working returns a "hard
> disk read failure" error.
>
> Trawling the web, I found a short thread entitled "HD repair techniques"
> on cctalk. Like the original author of this thread, I too have a drive
> that contains data that is perhaps not worth the hundreds of pounds
> (GBP) that professional data recovery entails but wouldn't mind
> recovering the data all the same.
>
> Can anybody point me in the direction of any good information regarding
> the testing/diagnosis/repair of head-disk-assembly problems?

First off, don't rush to "repair" or open up the HDA. From the sounds of
it, the drive itself may not be the problem at all.

Do you remember if your computer used an enhanced or caching type hard
drive controller? Many of these controllers allocated space on the drive
differently than an industry standard ATA controller did.

Do you know if you had access to the full 540MB of drive space? DOS had a
limit of ~527MB back then, but it was often worked around by using a 3rd
party ATA controller with LBA. Maybe your newer system is trying to use
LBA, when the drive was formatted without it?

If you used a plain ATA controller, with or without LBA, there is also a
possibility that the drive was originally formatted with a different CHS
(cylinders/heads/sectors) than what the drive will report when it is
auto-configured by a modern BIOS.

-Toth

---

From: Vintage Computer Festival <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue Jul 29 23:04:00 2003

> drive (LBA, 32 bit access, pio modes etc)

That might be the problem.  The drive may have been formatted under
incorrect parameters.  If this is the case, can the parameters be
ascertained somehow?

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

 * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

---

From: Doc <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 30 00:10:00 2003

> incorrect parameters.  If this is the case, can the parameters be

   I'd try Spinrite on it.  I don't recall offhand if it will determine 
effective geometry, but it would be the next most likely of any disk 
tool I've ever used.

   First most likely would be GNU/Linux sfdisk.  Read the man page 
*carefully* first.

	Doc

---

From: "TeoZ" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 30 00:56:01 2003

The older drives have the settings printed on the top of the drive cyl heads
sectors etc

---

From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 30 03:12:00 2003

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, TeoZ wrote:
> The older drives have the settings printed on the top of the drive cyl
> heads sectors etc

True, and sometimes whats printed on the drive does not match what the
drive reports to the BIOS. Of course, sometimes people would use settings
from a book of hard drive settings, especially when the drive was already
installed. The settings printed in such a book don't always match whats
printed on the drive or what the drive reports to the BIOS.

Yet another benefit of SCSI...

-Toth

---

From: Doc <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 30 05:32:01 2003

> printed on the drive or what the drive reports to the BIOS.

   Not only that, but Quantum was the worst about mislabelling drives. 
I've seen several sub-1GB Quantum IDE drives with SCSI jumper settings 
on the label, or vice versa, and many with the wrong size and geometry.

	Doc

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed Jul 30 05:43:00 2003

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Doc wrote:

> > drive reports to the BIOS. Of course, sometimes people would use
> > settings from a book of hard drive settings, especially when the drive
> > was already installed. The settings printed in such a book don't
> > always match whats printed on the drive or what the drive reports to
> > the BIOS.
>

So there isn't any reliable way of knowing the drive geometry on older IDE
drives?  Another reason for me to not use IDE whenever possible.  I think
the only machine I have that has IDE in it is my Powerbook.

Peace...  Sridhar

---

From: Tothwolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 30 15:02:00 2003

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 [email-masked] wrote:
> > > True, and sometimes whats printed on the drive does not match what
> > > the drive reports to the BIOS. Of course, sometimes people would use
> > > settings from a book of hard drive settings, especially when the
> > > drive was already installed. The settings printed in such a book
> > > don't always match whats printed on the drive or what the drive
> > > reports to the BIOS.
> >
> So there isn't any reliable way of knowing the drive geometry on older
> IDE drives?  Another reason for me to not use IDE whenever possible.  I
> think the only machine I have that has IDE in it is my Powerbook.

The most reliably way seems to be to always allow the system to
auto-detect the drive's settings. Some enhanced or non-standard ATA
controllers will still sometimes allocate space on the drive in a
nonstandard way, so you still have to watch those. Of course this won't
help for an old drive that someone is trying to recover data from...

-Toth