My last Tandy woe before I give up: Bad drive in Tandy TL/2?

[raifield]

I've had three Tandy systems now, a 1000 SX, which stopped working, a SL, which never worked, and now a TL/2, which may be working, but I'm not sure. I've posted this issue in the Tandy section of the forum because it deals with the proprietary interface.

The Tandy TL/2 came with a 20MB hard drive for its proprietary SmartDrive on-board interface. The system boots up fine, the hard drive is usable, except I can't format it due to bad sectors at about sector 44 causing the format to terminate. I ran Spinrite, which detected two bad sectors, not a problem. So I decided to try a low-level format of the drive using Spinrite. So far it's been about 14 hours into the format and it's been stuck reading and writing a sector 768 for about six hours now. Previously, the formatting was going at about 30,000 bytes a second, according to Spinrite, now it's stuck at about 1,000 every second, the hard drive just making the same sound over and over as it continues to apparently write to the sector.

A Spinrite analysis of the drive with low-level formatting suppressed with scan the whole drive successfully, but it will pause at the problem sector for 30 seconds before continuing onward to complete successfully, which is why I've left the format on overnight, hoping it would motor through whatever is wrong there. But so far, it is still stuck, having written

Is this drive simply kaput? Is there another way to map bad sectors so that I might be able to finish a high-level format? I'd hate to junk or sell this Tandy due to an inability to get a drive working, as its the only one I have left, but it isn't much use without one.

 

[dracos]

Ok, mind it's been years, so my memory could be suspect.
The smart drive I believe was an IDE, or properly an xt-ide?.
That being the case, you should never low-level format an ide. When I did that years ago I ended up with a half as big RLL drive.
I'm not sure I ever salvaged that drive.
Don't act onn this, wait for someone else on the forum to confirm this,.

Good luck!

 

[Great Hierophant]

This is correct, the TL/2 uses an 8-bit IDE interface. You probably have either a Seagate ST-325X or a Western Digital WD93028-X, both 20MB drives with the XT IDE interface. Unfortunately, IDE drives cannot be low-level formatted, so you cannot use that to tell the drive and DOS that there are some more bad sectors.

Ok, mind it's been years, so my memory could be suspect.
The smart drive I believe was an IDE, or properly an xt-ide?.
That being the case, you should never low-level format an ide. When I did that years ago I ended up with a half as big RLL drive.
I'm not sure I ever salvaged that drive.
Don't act onn this, wait for someone else on the forum to confirm this,.

Good luck!

 

[Chuck(G)]

Is there any sort of crying need for an 8-bit IDE interface for these old systems with integrated controllers? I'd assumed that folks just wandered off and purchased an XTIDE controller and disabled the on-board ones.

However, if that's not the case, it shouldn't be a big deal to emulate an XTA drive with a small microcontroller.

 

[raifield]

This is correct, the TL/2 uses an 8-bit IDE interface. You probably have either a Seagate ST-325X or a Western Digital WD93028-X, both 20MB drives with the XT IDE interface. Unfortunately, IDE drives cannot be low-level formatted, so you cannot use that to tell the drive and DOS that there are some more bad sectors.

That's what I figured after my third attempt. I'm running the Spinrite analysis with low-level formatting disabled, so I'm hoping that does the trick. Trying to boot a MS-DOS 6.22 floppy to use Scandisk simply doesn't work, the command.com isn't recognized and scandisk obviously doesn't work in MS-DOS 3.3.

If the Spinrite analysis doesn't work, is there other software will mark bad sectors?

And I'd love to buy an XTIDE controller, but to my understanding, none are available yet from the newer production batch. At least, the mailing list hasn't said so. I should look into that a bit deeper.

 

[dabone]

Whats wrong with your sx? I've got 2 parts motherboards.

Later,
dabone

 

[raifield]

Whats wrong with your sx? I've got 2 parts motherboards.

Later,
dabone

Nothing with the system itself, but the floppy drive is no longer working after the aborted move from the SX to the now-junked SL. The computer is quite usable still, the 20MB hard card has zero issues and Tandy DOS 3.2 Saying it was broken wasn't quite accurate, but its use has declined for me if I don't have a rescue method should something go on the ancient hard drive. I was going to try and sell the SX cheap on this forum if I got the TL/2's hard drive working correctly.

I did a search on the old version of Spinrite I have. Apparently on the heaviest testing mode, which I was using, it will write gigabytes of data to the drive in an attempt to exhaustively test each sector. As this is a 20MB drive, I might have been jumping the gun in assuming something was catastrophically wrong. The software does hang on the same sector, which is found as Bad during a surface scan. I'm thinking I should just leave the thing running with low level formatting disabled and see what happens after it has run for a few days. I don't know.

 

[dabone]

My 20meg Hard card that came in one of my SX's was a 8 Bit Ide drive, maybe you could use that drive in your sl/2?

Later,
dabone

 

[raifield]

My 20meg Hard card that came in one of my SX's was a 8 Bit Ide drive, maybe you could use that drive in your sl/2?

Later,
dabone

I could, it does work, but the card is physically unstable, as the TL/2 case is longer than the hard card bracket. I'd rather not do that simply because this drive seems like it could be fixed, but I can't figure out how to mark the sectors as unusable. I found an older, German copy of Norton Disk Doctor, which did find the sectors and apparently mark them as bad, but trying to format the drive fails at the cylinder with the first bad sector. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Maybe there is a separate command to tell Norton Disk Doctor to write the bad sectors to the FAT? Running Spinrite after Norton doesn't list the sectors as being marked.

 

[dabone]

I meant the actual drive off the hard card, not the entire card.

I believe that disk doctor will mark bad sectors on a formatted drive, but when you format that list goes away again.
I'd try hooking that drive up to the sx's controller and seeing if that one would format it. What do you have to lose?

Later,
dabone

 

[Great Hierophant]

While it would be nice to create something that could convert AT IDE drive data and commands into XT IDE drive data and commands, I would not think there is just that great a market for it. This XTA interface may not be well-documented, and I wonder if the BIOS for these boards would be able to recognize more than 40MB.

Is there any sort of crying need for an 8-bit IDE interface for these old systems with integrated controllers? I'd assumed that folks just wandered off and purchased an XTIDE controller and disabled the on-board ones.

However, if that's not the case, it shouldn't be a big deal to emulate an XTA drive with a small microcontroller.

 

[raifield]

I meant the actual drive off the hard card, not the entire card.

I believe that disk doctor will mark bad sectors on a formatted drive, but when you format that list goes away again.
I'd try hooking that drive up to the sx's controller and seeing if that one would format it. What do you have to lose?

Later,
dabone

The Tandy TL/2 uses it's proprietary XT-esque hard drive controller. I can't disconnect the hard card drive, which is MFM (or RLL) and use it in any other way other than the hard card.

What I did do is delete the partition and create one partition terminating at one cylinder before the bad one, then created a second partition, starting at the bad one. Why this worked, I have no idea, but I was able to format both without any issues. Formatting did reveal and mark two bad sectors on the second partition, neither of which was the one that was causing the formatting to fail originally. Not sure why it worked, but I now have a 10MB and 11MB partition.

The problem is solved, though the mystery remains. Now I've got to see about selling the SX and maybe trading in my Trantor 130B SCSI card for something that will work in the TL/2.