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ESDI HDD Trouble

T

TheLazy1

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 2, 2009
Messages
370
Location
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Hi.
I'm finally getting around to testing my old parts and my combo of an Ultrastor ULTRA12F24 and Micropolis 1558 is no longer working.

I'm currently testing it in a ISA/VLB 486 board and all it does is give me a C: drive error on boot.
I had previously tested it working on either my IBM 5162 or PCChips M919, I can't remember which.

Is it more likely that the drive just died of old age?
The floppy controller part works though at least lol.
 
You might try a slower board, e.g., 286 or 386. If that doesn't give any results you could give it a LLF and see if that makes a difference.
 
Oh sorry, I typed that out too quickly without making sure it made any sense.

I only have one 286 I can try, I'll have to dig it out later.
Is the low-level format done by a utility or is it the one built into the bios?

I tried the bios formatter and it stalled on track 0 cyl 0.
 
Does the 486 motherboard have any hard drive controller installed? That could cause a similar problem.

Second, before running any low level formatter, double check that the jumpers are correct for the mode you are going to be using. One of the problems with the very complex jumpering system Micropolis used was that a jumper could slip and have the drive in a mode for a different system. Termination pack too.

There were a couple of different ways to get at UltraStor's LLF tools depending on card: through the BIOS, through a DEBUG call to part of the BIOS, or through a disk supplied utility. Some allowed all three but it was necessary to turn off card BIOS to use disk routine. UltraStor was unusual. I think yours has a card BIOS which is easy.

http://kuci.org/~ustor/downloads/12x/ has some drivers and manuals. The manuals are in PageMaker 4 format which is awkward.
 
You could use SpeedStor to LLF the drive and test the controller as well. It's a good program and pretty straightforward. If you need it, let me know.
 
I got to the LLF utility using DEBUG, thanks :D
So far it's done it's format and is on the verify stage and it looks not so good, 1000 problems so far and its only just started.

Unless just the end of the drive is bad things aren't looking so good lol.
 
If it close to every sector, then the drive is set to the wrong sector size.
The FAQ suggests

Verifying is reporting every sector as bad and some of them have astrix, *,
mark.

- Set the drive to be Hard Sectored mode.
- Number of sectors may be set too high, change to one less.
- Format the drive before do verify.
- * mark means already marked bad spot.
 
Hard sectored mode was already set, I dropped it to 35 sectors though and it's formatting now.
First thing it did though:
cCLGgmr.jpg


Update:
It's doing the same thing and marking everything as bad.
 
Last edited:
That does not seem promising. All I can suggest is examining the circuit board of the drive and seeing if any components burned out. Long shot but I think all the failures caused by incorrect setup have been checked.

Well, hold off a few days just in case someone else has a good idea, but the drive looks dead. If you can keep a clean environment, you could open the drive and see if any major damage to drive heads or platters happened.
 
I cancelled it after it had gone for at least 2 hours, at that time the HDD was still making the same sounds and the error list was still showing every sector.
I could try again today and see though.
 
Unfortunately, it appears to be hosed. Not too uncommon with drives of that type and age. I've got a large pile of full height and some half height doorstops. :-) Even without much use time takes its toll on them.
 
I recall from the manuals for my DTC ESDI controllers that there were numerous jumper settings. On the outside chance that you may have gotten something set wrong, have you double-checked?
 
Al Kossow said:
I've got a data recovery project that I could use the controller for, if it's available.
Click to expand...

Cool!
I'll let you know after I try a few more times.

Chuck(G) said:
I recall from the manuals for my DTC ESDI controllers that there were numerous jumper settings. On the outside chance that you may have gotten something set wrong, have you double-checked?
Click to expand...

I set all the jumpers on the board to the defaults as said by th99, however in the interest of completeness I'll mess around a bit more.
:)
 
I mention this only because I remember the struggle with getting my Miniscribes set up right. You might try setting both the drive and controller for soft-sector operation to see if there's any difference.
 
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