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HDD controller failure

S

squirrel-steam

Experienced Member
Joined
May 6, 2007
Messages
87
Location
Michigan, US
My DSI 386DX is coughing up errors (again)

I bought a new 210mb and 8mb ram, and now it is coughing up new errors, it seems after i put the new ram in and hd, now it says wait... after post for about 5 mins, then says "HDD controller failure hit F1 to continue", so i do. Then it starts to read the floppy, and it takes 20-30mins to start the ms-dos startup disk. No commands work for it, it just says "cannot read fixed disk"

Any thoughts?
 
Did you set the drive type in BIOS to reflect the new drive? This can happen if you don't have the drive set right in bios. I can look up the settings for the drive I sent.

Is the drive configurable in this motherboard, or are you limited to built in drive types?
 
If a memory problem it probably wouldn't even start. I still say make sure the drive is set prooperly in bios. I had the same issue when I first put that drive back into a different machine saturday morning.
 
I fixed it, i had the jumpers on the the hd set to master instead of cable select. I had to set the dimensions for the hd in the bios manually in one of the user define options, read the dimensions off the top of the hd. Shows up as 203mb in the bios, and I checked it for bad sectors and such with the bios's hd checking software, and it came up with no bad sectors. The ram shows up as 8024kb of ram, but im still having problems making the boot disk see the C drive, still says "Invalid drive specification"
 
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Did you boot to dos from floppy and run fdisk? Does FDisk see it? If so, partition it and make sure the partition is ACTIVE. Reboot and format /s from the dos prompt.

Don't use the BIOS formatting routines. I _think_ it may ruin the formatting on an IDE drive.
 
The problem is that no msdos app sees it as a real drive, in fdisk, it will check the drive integrity, and make a partition on it and set it active, but when i restart by either hitting the reset button (after i go back to the A: prompt,) or hitting alt-ctrl-del. Then they dissappear.
 
And if you run FDISK after rebooting, it sees no partition on the drive? What version of DOS? It was formatted with 6.22.
 
I use a windows 98 startup disk, basically 6.22, i also have a 6.22 startup disk maker, i will try that. But it did the same thing with the other hard drive.
 
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