jacobtohahn
Experienced Member
I recently found two Seagate MFM hard drives (Seagate ST-251, Seagate ST-225) in a storage unit and I’m trying to get them to work with my IBM PC AT. Both drives make their startup sounds, but give hard disk errors in the BIOS. Because I have a BIOS with the ability to low level format, I tried to use it to wipe the disks. However, the procedure returns “Write Fault on Selected Drive” or other errors like “Sector not found”. Doing a surface scan in the BIOS reports that every sector is bad (except for on the last cylinder, for some reason), and the format operation afterwards returns a write fault error.
I also tried using SpeedStor and Disk Manager to low level format. Disk Manager just doesn’t even want to work. SpeedStor, however, is a little more promising. The controller test passes, and the seek test also passes, so the controller is getting commands through to the drives and they’re not stuck and all that. However, the read test fails almost immediately (and the drive activity light never actually comes on on the ST-251, and stays permanently on on the ST-225), so it looks like read/write operations don’t work.
What could be going on here? I would assume that if the drive can seek and such, it would be able to read and write as well, and I find it odd that two drives would have the exact same problem.
Other notes: I’ve tried 3 different controllers, different cables, and I’ve tried changing the drive select around. I’m using an AMI 286 BIOS in my AT. Most importantly, a CM 6426 that came in the AT works just fine.
I also tried using SpeedStor and Disk Manager to low level format. Disk Manager just doesn’t even want to work. SpeedStor, however, is a little more promising. The controller test passes, and the seek test also passes, so the controller is getting commands through to the drives and they’re not stuck and all that. However, the read test fails almost immediately (and the drive activity light never actually comes on on the ST-251, and stays permanently on on the ST-225), so it looks like read/write operations don’t work.
What could be going on here? I would assume that if the drive can seek and such, it would be able to read and write as well, and I find it odd that two drives would have the exact same problem.
Other notes: I’ve tried 3 different controllers, different cables, and I’ve tried changing the drive select around. I’m using an AMI 286 BIOS in my AT. Most importantly, a CM 6426 that came in the AT works just fine.