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a new AT&T 486SX computer that I may have toasted..... :(

I have done the same thing before as well. It left the same nice crispy pin hole too. I noticed the problem pretty quickly so my board survived with only a dead CPU.
 
Maverick1978 said:
It's Stone's way of letting you know that you've options other than eBay, and probably cheaper than eBay, and already tested/working. PM him if you need any of what he's listed.
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Allrighty, I'll do that probably.

also, that corner where the corrosion is going on a tiny bit, I found like 3 or 4 traces that got turned brown by it, does that mean that those traces are destoryed? or are they possibly ok? Its by the keyboard plug. and a bit got on some of the ram chips, but I cleaned them off and cleaned off the ram slots as good as I could. Even if those slots are messed up, I could use the other 4 ram slots.
 
So, I bought a 486dx 33mhz last thursday, and it should arrive today, according to the tracking. so if I'm still here when it gets here, I'll be playing around with that and hopefully I have a working system.
 
So I put the new dx cpu in, changed the jumpers to set it for a 486dx, and its working very very nicely, but now the thing I need to figure out is the hard drive.

I have a 1gb maxtor drive I wanna put in there for now, or maybe use my dying caviar drive, and so I need to figure out the parameters. its all nice going until the computer asked me for "precomp" and thats not listed on the drive anywhere, so I don't know what that is, and the autodetect never gets them right.

So can anyone help me figure out what the precomp is?
 
I'm assuming that the Maxtor is an IDE drive (I'm not aware of any MFM drives that were that big, but ESDI got close). MFM drives use precompensation on inner cylinders to avoid the effects of "bit crowding", that is, when recording domain changes spatially close together, they will tend to spread apart. So precompensation looks at the bit you've just recorded and the bit you're recording and the bit that follows at adjusts the bit clock timing by very small amounts to compensate for the effect.

IDE drives don't need to (and can't be) be told about precomp, parking, etc. Just use 0 for those values.
 
So in the odd case that the ide auto detection works correctly, it sets precomp to like 65155 or something like that. Both drives I've tried ended up having bad sectors or "missing sectors" making some directories unreadable, and these drives were fine on all my pentiums. Could this multi IO/fdd/hdd controller card be going bad?
 
You may want to manually enter in the settings, and set the write precomp to 0 and see if that'll let you properly read the directories. Do you have any other drives to try on this card and see if it has the same effect for all the drives?
 
Tr3vor said:
So in the odd case that the ide auto detection works correctly, it sets precomp to like 65155 or something like that. Both drives I've tried ended up having bad sectors or "missing sectors" making some directories unreadable, and these drives were fine on all my pentiums. Could this multi IO/fdd/hdd controller card be going bad?
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You probably mean 65535. It sounds as if what the system is using for its geometry is not what the drive really is. How about some specifics (what drive are you using, what does the system report for a geometry?).
 
alright, I've tried 2 IDE drives, both get the same "sector not found" error in dos when looking in certain directories, formating, etc. one time I ran doom and it got this error midgame and put me in the last level lol.

here is the drives and thier geometries:

Western Digital Caviar 21200 1.2gb: 1484 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 spt (sectors?)
Maxtor model 91531U3 ~2gb: 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors.

what the computer is reporting:

WD: 2484 cylinders, 16 heads, 65535 precomp, 2483 landzone, 63 sectors
Maxtor: 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 65535 precomp, 16382 landzone, and 63 sectors

even though the computer detects the caviar having 1000 more cylinders than the drive says, it still says that its 1222mb, which is correct.

could it be the multi I/O-ide-fdd controller card thing?
 
Tr3vor said:
Western Digital Caviar 21200 1.2gb: 1484 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 spt (sectors?)
Maxtor model 91531U3 ~2gb: 16383 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors.
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Sometimes it helps to step back a moment and think. How is it that the Maxtor drive can have the same number of sectors per track and heads and less than twice the capacity of the WD can have over 10 times as many cylinders? :huh:
 
Chuck(G) said:
Sometimes it helps to step back a moment and think. How is it that the Maxtor drive can have the same number of sectors per track and heads and less than twice the capacity of the WD can have over 10 times as many cylinders? :huh:
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Easy, Chuck... If you have a DOS/FAT16 partitioned disk. :)
 
I messed up, the WD says on the drive 2484 cylinders.

I don't know why the maxtor isn't bigger. Its not partitioned, when I hook it up the a windows xp computer, its just 2gb. if I look at the model number and look it up, it appears that it should be somewhere in the 15gb range...

I'm confused...

This is the only controller card that I have. should I take it out and try to look for a model number?
 
Yes, it is partitioned. If it weren't partitioned you couldn't use it. :)

FWIW, what you have is not a controller card -- it's an IDE interface card. The controller is on the drive's logic board.
 
Stone said:
Yes, it is partitioned. If it weren't partitioned you couldn't use it. :)

FWIW, what you have is not a controller card -- it's an IDE interface card. The controller is on the drive's logic board.
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hmm, maybe I should format it in FAT32 and put it in my windows 98 machine :) that seems like a good idea, but that still leaves me with the interface card (learn something new every day :p ).

do you think that its the interface card's problem, because it seems that it works for the most part, it'll boot dos, but every once in a while it will give me the sector not found error, maybe I'm putting in the geometry wrong?
 
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