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Trouble low level formatting MFM drive...

I'm starting to get that sense of futility. ;) I do still have a jrIDE board to build up. Oh well... at least I've got a nifty enclosure...
 
SpidersWeb said:
I prefer to do an LLF before it's necessary anywho - nice fresh sector markers, and if it's on it's last legs I can't trust it anyway.

I've got a flakey TM-252 too, mine isn't as bad - I can LLF, FDISK, FORMAT, install DOS, and use it reliably for a while - but a few days later I'll start getting little bits go missing. The only other drives I've had which were flakey with data retention, had both suffered head damage so they had a good excuse.
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I remember having a hard drive that would lose data over time. I seem to remember using an utility that would read and then write back the data to the disk. Supposedly this refreshed the magnetic flux and the data would stay for awhile before again I would need to read/rewrite to refresh it again. Really don't remember what program I used.

Bill
Smithville, NJ
 
geoffm3 said:
IS TRACK 0 BAD??? lol

Thanks for the link. Good to see the anatomy of the drive... course not much different than most this vintage, is it?
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Yep!

Yeah it's all pretty similar. But the differences I noticed were it's use of a right angled head arm (which became common anyway) and different coloured platters - I wondered if the alternative surface material might have some effect on long term reliability (I have no idea). I do know my two ST412s, despite rust, despite being seized at one point and grinding their bearings - never lose data nor have any new bad sectors since new.

natcha said:
I remember having a hard drive that would lose data over time. I seem to remember using an utility that would read and then write back the data to the disk. Supposedly this refreshed the magnetic flux and the data would stay for awhile before again I would need to read/rewrite to refresh it again. Really don't remember what program I used.

Bill
Smithville, NJ
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I use Norton Calibrate - it does a non-destructive LLF at the same time as rewriting the data and can calculate the best / change the interleave. But I'd suspect if you were doing that regularly it was probably a quicker program. I may try Spinrite, and modem7's idea of letting it settle before testing for clusters, but I have other reliable drives to use in the interim :)
 
geoffm3 said:
I noticed a couple of issues during the tinkering. And, when I first powered the system up, the hard disk activity LED came on at about half the normal intensity when active and during POST the system printed "10MB RACORE HARD DISK FAILURE". Thinking maybe the drive had bit it I swapped it out for another drive... a Tandon TM-262 drive. This drive sorta worked too, but apparently this drive has some issues of its own (the spindle motor kept stopping on its own, even though power was still good on the power connector). This is not too surprising as the spindle motor on this drive was stuck when I first got it...it wouldn't start on its own and I had to manually turn the spindle to break it free. It also reported this HARD DISK ERROR message on startup (which indicates there was a problem probing for the drive as near as I can tell). I unplugged and plugged in the controller and the drive cables and it started working a little better, and I eventually got it to low level format, partition and DOS format (with errors). It eventually quit spinning in the middle of a write though, and spontaneously after a few seconds would start back up. It did attempt to format that drive as only 10MB so I presume that the Racore firmware is hard coded to 10MB or there's some setting to alter the drive parameters. I have the printed manual and it doesn't give any detail on how you would do this... it doesn't even give detail on low level formatting the drive though either.

Anyway, back to the 10MB TM-252. I finally gave up on the TM-262 drive and put the 10MB drive back on, and tried the low level format. This time it worked fine, and after partitioning and formatting DOS showed no errors. When I started loading some software onto the drive DOS reported a few data errors though. In addition to this, while accessing the drive occasionally spurious trash characters. would appear on the screen. At one point the whole background even turned green with light green text. I presume that this is because of some bad connection on the expansion connector, and/or the power connector, and/or the piggyback memory board on the processor (this system has a jr Hotshot memory expansion board that sandwiches between the processor and the motherboard). Maybe that's rattled loose in the process of working on the thing. I'll have to go back and verify all the connections.
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It sounds to me like you've got a problem with the PSU. I'd concentrate my efforts on that first and worry about the harddrives later.
 
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