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Connor drives not recognised under Windows 11

Brian Todd

Brian Todd

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Joined
Nov 21, 2022
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The Netherlands
Maybe I am missing something obvious, but I tried to hook up a Connor CP-3024 and a Connor CP-30254 to my Windows 11 PC via an IDE to USB convertor. Both drives spin up and I can hear them seeking, but I can only see them under the Device Manager in Windows as they are not recognised as drives in explorer. I have tried both master and slave settings, but this makes no difference to the behaviour. Any ideas please?
 
Could be that drives that old didn't implement LBA. Note that USB MSC class is really a subset of SCSI, which is exclusively LBA. Your converter probably doesn't have the smarts to translate from CHS to LBA.
 
I have never had any compatibility problem that was helped by adding USB to the mix.

It's probably because the converter is hardcoded to use LBA addressing when making ATA commands to the drives, while the drives only accept CHS addressing. Also, it likely relies on ATA IDENTIFY to gather information about the drives since it doesn't offer you any way to program those settings, and perhaps what such old drives produce doesn't totally match what the converter is trying to parse.
 
What does Device Manager say about them? Are they flagged in any way? Is it possible they are not formatted? Just some thoughts.
 
You might also try looking in diskmgmt.msc. If they aren't partitioned, or none of the partitions are Windows-compatible, they might not get assigned any drive letters.
 
Device Manager recognises them but does not give any further information. As far as I remember they are both formatted, but I can check diskmgmt.msc to see if there is any further detail. Could be lack of LBA of course. They were both my dad's and he passed away almost 30 years ago, so I would love to see what is on them.
 
SATA->IDE adapters seem more compatible. Been able to image old 40Mb and 200Mb drives that way.
 
Lack of LBA support would definitely be a dead end for most USB-IDE devices. You may as well not even try with drives <500MB in my experience, most of them just don't work. Anything >8GB is guaranteed to support LBA and stuff in between 500 and 8000MB are generally 70/30 in favor of LBA. Drives under 500MB are more like the reverse in my experience, and I personally have no drives in the 20-80MB range which support LBA.
 
famicomaster2 said:
Lack of LBA support would definitely be a dead end for most USB-IDE devices. You may as well not even try with drives <500MB in my experience, most of them just don't work. Anything >8GB is guaranteed to support LBA and stuff in between 500 and 8000MB are generally 70/30 in favor of LBA. Drives under 500MB are more like the reverse in my experience, and I personally have no drives in the 20-80MB range which support LBA.
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I have rapidly come to the same conclusion as well! I tried the convertor on various Windows rigs, some recognise a USB disk but none show it as a hard disk. I guess the solution is to connect as secondary to my AT rig and go from there! Thanks for the advice.
 
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