If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the disk has issues, rather than the controller. Do you get the divide error if the HD is disconnected?Yes it did. But if the disk got damaged that would maybe explain what is happening.
Am I right in thinking that controllers that don't have any jumpers or BIOS configs for the drives (e.g. WDXT-GEN) would write the CHS information to track zero?Depends. If the controller is 8-bit, chances are low, since each controller did things differently (CHS hard-coded, stored on track 0 etc.). If it is 16-bit, you may have luck by using e.g. a WD1006. At that time, they pretty much all worked the same - using the CHS values stored by the BIOS in CMOS.
Correct. Same revision etc are interchangeable. Seen a couple cards where different firmware versions are incompatible but frequently doesn't matter. Some brands different similar models are interchangeable. No list exists to document what is compatible. If things work a lot of people don't report anything so I don't have that much data on what is compatible. I get the doesn't work which then leads to another new format in the tool.Ah so the controller pairing is actually about ensuring the controller is the same model, revision, and firmware version of the card that originally formatted the drive not that it's literally the same card?
The actual NEED in the community for such a device has also been so low (in a PC especially most people switched to devices like the XT-IDE if their original drive died) it wasn't practical for them to enter mass production and bring the price down in volume of sales.