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MiniScribe 8450XT 40MB harddisk

A 30-second format seems too quick to be doing anything.

Since you have run a format, have you tried using the disk yet? Does it boot??

Maybe you can run one of the disk utility programs to see what the system says it is -heads/tracks/sectors, compare it to the specs on the Miniscribe & Seagate. Might help you decide what you can do then.
 
What are you using for partitioning? There is an older version of the Ranish partition manager that runs on the 8088 that I discovered recently that should work fine. The user interface is not intuitive but it is far more flexible than the standard FDISK. It can also be used to test drives by writing every sector.

Regarding formatting: On the low end assume that your IDE drive and interface are capable of 300KB/sec. If the DOS format had to touch *every* sector in the partition that would require 68 seconds. A more reasonable estimate would be 500KB/sec which would get you down to around 40 seconds. This particular drive was pretty good and it had a 14Mb/sec data rate (1.4MB/sec roughly with some overhead) so being done with the format in under 30 seconds is quite reasonable.
 
The Seagate has 820 tracks, 2,6 heads and 17 sectors/track (not sure how it does either 2 or 6 heads)

The ST-351A/X physically has only one disc platter with two heads, 896 cylinders, and 41 to 57 sectors per track (the innermost tracks have fewer sectors and the outermost ones have more)... but it emulates having 820 cylinders, 6 heads, and a fixed amount of 17 sectors per track -- the same parameters as Seagate's own ST-251 drive. That way it would work on BIOSes not offering user-defined drive parameters, because every BIOS is guaranteed to have the settings for the ST-251 on its list, since that was one of the most popular MFM hard drives ever made.
 
So the HeadStart is seeing this drive as 20MB because it expects another platter and heads? The MiniScribe is two platters IIRC, I once opened one up. Weird thing is how FDISK did report the initial partition on both drives as 41MB and non-DOS. I couldn't boot from those, the cursor just kept blinking on screen (I wanted to see if anything useful was on them)... however the 20MB partition works, now if I could just get them to work at the full 40MB, my 100 bucks wasn't a total waste :oops:
 
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