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Sata <-> ide

Raven

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I was trying to set up new storage for my old machines, since I'm still running late IDE drives on them with drive overlay software. The drive overlays will still be necessary, of course, but I can at least use a SATA<->IDE adapter these days.. right?

So I hooked up a 120GB SSD that was on sale for cheap to said adapter and hooked it up to my Presario 4402 box. I ran Ontrack and got it to boot a few times (I think? So many attempts and my memories are hazy at this point), then tried repartitioning and since then have not been able to get the SSD to work consistently on any machine. That was a Pentium box, but I'm getting to the 486 part.

I was frustrated after like 8 hours of hooking things up, formatting, and testing things. Out of the need for more data points, I hooked it up to my Presario 425 and booted to my Ontrack disks. Unlike on the 4402, it reported a drive with no name (and we mean hardware name, here - KINGSTON something or other in this case) that wasn't yet set up (i.e. it saw no partitions/etc.). I hit cancel and looked at the list of drives it saw, and it reported that the disk was 137MB in size (might be remembering the last digit wrong). That's pretty weird!

During boot of Ontrack it spits out some information about the HDD controller and drives attached, and on the 4402 it had been saying 32-bit LBA. On the 425 it said 16-bit CHS. Both machines have the 8GB barrier limitation.

My head is spinning at this point. Before this I'd also wrestled with trying to get SD->IDE adapters working (to find out that lots of them seem to fail to commit changes, including mine, acting as only a read-only drive for some reason), so I'm especially fried.

Has anyone else messed with SATA<->IDE adapters? Even if not, does anyone know if there should/would be a difference between 16-bit CHS and 32-bit LBA when we're talking about using a piece of software designed to bypass BIOS limitations like this?

I've had upward of a 750GB IDE disk working fine in the 425 in the past, so I know it can handle it. I did learn that after 137GB it started to corrupt, so I switched to using 120GB disks in my retro machines. I've had a WD 120GB disk running in my 425 for years now without a hitch, and the same disk boots the 4402 fine.

I'm going to go mess with a 750GB SATA disk I have laying around and see if the specific SSD drive is a problem, but as I understand it should make no difference other than efficiency for the SSD being sacrificed on an OS/hardware that are ignorant of it.

Any input would be much appreciated - sorry for how scatterbrained this post is, but that's just the state my head is in from this mess.

Edit: Checked things out with the 750GB SATA. Remembered that in the 4402 it refuses to boot sometimes with the SATA<->IDE adapter set up (haven't figured out the specific conditions that cause this), instead freezing shortly into booting to a floppy (i.e., one line of text, then freezes with a blinking cursor and may or may not respond to Ctrl+Alt+Del). The 750GB SATA had the same situation on the 425, reporting 131.60MB, which I believe was the same as the 120GB SSD. A detail I left out before (forgot) was that it reports in LBA that it's an 8GB disk in the 425 as well, another difference from the 4402.

By the way, I tried a PCI IDE controller (Promise brand) in the 4402 and it didn't seem to react to it at all. I'm guessing that this 95-96 Pentium isn't compatible with PCI option ROMs, maybe predating them?
 
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Hmm, I wonder if new SSDs have broken CHS addressing?

Exactly brand/model of adapter are you using? Some of these kinds of adapters are literally non-functional right out of the box, but nobody complains.

I assume the drive works on a newer computer? You might have to use something to wipe old partition data.
 
In a previous thread about my A7N8X-E Deluxe project, I had some experience attempting to partition, format, and eventually use a Kingston 120, PNY 120, and SanDisk 120 SSD's, as well as a 250 GB SATA IDE. The PNY and Kingston would not partition and format properly regardless of which ever formatting tool I used. The SanDisk reacted more favorably. The big problem with the A7 system is that it only supports SATA 1. I found SATA 1 to be acceptable for all OS's less than W7.

One problem that I initially had was a 'hidden' jumper on the mobo to enable/disable the SATA function, which also had BIOS SATA settings. You might want to comb through your mobo to see if you have inadvertently missed something. I haven't tried an overlay on a SSD, as I normally use 4 or 8 GB CF cards along with a SIIG ISA controller, which tops out at 8.2 GB. The SIIG works fine with all of my 386 & 486 boards.

The bottom line is I don't trust SSD's with respect to overlays or even partitioning. As far as the PNY and Kingston goes, I could not successfully partition them even on my big W10 gamer setup. I would never rule out 'operator error' but I pretty much know my way around when trying to fudge things on old PC's.

This probably isn't what your looking for, but you may want to take a good look at your hardware. I think the key is having a viable controller. Also, overlays are not always compliant. I've never tried one a GB hard drive. I've had good success on say a 80 or 100 MB with overlays in the past, but never saw the need to attempt a GB drive.
 
Hmm, I wonder if new SSDs have broken CHS addressing?

Exactly brand/model of adapter are you using? Some of these kinds of adapters are literally non-functional right out of the box, but nobody complains.

I assume the drive works on a newer computer? You might have to use something to wipe old partition data.

I've had it working as a drive, but not as a boot drive. It does work fine on a modern machine hooked up to a SATA controller. I'm 99% confident that the issue is in the BIOS interaction with the adapter or drive.

I haven't tried an overlay on a SSD, as I normally use 4 or 8 GB CF cards along with a SIIG ISA controller, which tops out at 8.2 GB. The SIIG works fine with all of my 386 & 486

Do you have a specific CF to IDE adapter that you can confirm works on at least as far back as a 486, and that can both read and write to the card without the data disappearing like with many SD to IDE adapters? I only have one 256MB CF card, yet do have a ton of micro SD and SD, so I haven't tried CF yet. I need as much storage as I can get, though, since I like to install piles of software and these are all-in-one machines mostly. Network drive works for some stuff, I suppose. CF cards are remarkably more expensive than both SD and SATA SSDs of the same size, though. It's about $30 for a 120gb SSD or a 64gb micro SD. For a 128gb CF it's around $150, and for 64gb it's around $75.. Makes it hard to want to switch to that when it's that pricey. I also thought CF was a dying technology, superseded by SD or xD in most markets, but I guess it's still being upgraded and produced. There are SD to CF adapters, if the key here is the CF to IDE tech and not the card itself..
 
BTW, for anything with PCI you might consider a VIA 6421 based PCI SATA interface card. That adds full BIOS LBA48 support, so no need for overlays and it has a protected mode driver for Windows 95. (Although from the sound if it, it might not solve the SSD partitioning problem)
 
I've had it working as a drive, but not as a boot drive. It does work fine on a modern machine hooked up to a SATA controller. I'm 99% confident that the issue is in the BIOS interaction with the adapter or drive.

Do you have a specific CF to IDE adapter that you can confirm works on at least as far back as a 486, and that can both read and write to the card without the data disappearing like with many SD to IDE adapters? I only have one 256MB CF card, yet do have a ton of micro SD and SD, so I haven't tried CF yet. I need as much storage as I can get, though, since I like to install piles of software and these are all-in-one machines mostly. Network drive works for some stuff, I suppose. CF cards are remarkably more expensive than both SD and SATA SSDs of the same size, though. It's about $30 for a 120gb SSD or a 64gb micro SD. For a 128gb CF it's around $150, and for 64gb it's around $75.. Makes it hard to want to switch to that when it's that pricey. I also thought CF was a dying technology, superseded by SD or xD in most markets, but I guess it's still being upgraded and produced. There are SD to CF adapters, if the key here is the CF to IDE tech and not the card itself..

There's a discussion here somewhere, not too long ago, about CF cards - I'll have to look. I have a SanDisk Ultra 4 GB that I'm using on my 386 (486 Cyrix) along with a Chinese adapter right now. They're fairly inexpensive compared to a SSD, under $20 for a small sized one. I'm also using a SIIG 8.2 GB controller in that system. I went to the CF when the 40 GB IDE flat died.

8 GB
https://www.adorama.com/us 100141...jfhUrdm0QlD1B5j3wzVsDgTkQkOziMihoCXgcQAvD_BwE
 
I've found a number of the brand new SSD's just flat out do not work with MBR partitioning -- at all. They work fine with GPT (what modern OS use) but with MBR they just go bits-up face-down.

That could be what's biting you. It's why CF remains my go-to for vintage machines over SATA drives of any flavor.
 
So WHY do they go bits-up?

SSDs are supposed to just store data. It must scan the contents instead and shut down if it sees some data it doesn't like.... am I the only one who thinks that is wrong and potentially creepy?
 
So WHY do they go bits-up?

SSDs are supposed to just store
data. It must scan the contents instead and shut down if it sees some data it doesn't like.... am I the only one who thinks that is wrong and potentially creepy?

Dunno. But, I have some SSD's back some that required FORMAT/MBR because of some crap built in. For sure I've got 2 SSD's that you can't diddle with. I used Partition Magic, all sorts of utilities, and even some Linux stuff with no success. Seems like CF's just work.
 
Note, this post only means half of the question has been dealt with - still don't know why SATA disks show up as tiny disks on the Presario 425.

I think I've solved the mystery as relates to the Compaq 4402 - there is a BIOS option for each storage device that asks if you're running "DOS or DOS + Windows" or else (and I don't remember the precise wording) something like "Unix or other OS". I knew that this option has something to do with the part of the BIOS setup stored on partition, and knew that the Unix option meant you had to use the boot floppies to configure it. Since I couldn't get my disk partitioned the way I needed to for the BIOS partition (maybe now I can?) before, it would fail presumably trying to find that partition if the setup utility had run. If it hadn't run, it would boot, but only if things were all preconfigured at the stock CMOS level (this machine has no CMOS battery at the moment). Thus the confusion..

The takeaway is this:

With the Compaq machines with partition-based setup, you need to select the non-DOS option on any drive you intend to boot from without a setup partition. The BIOS only seems to know how to find that setup utility on a FAT16 partition within the first bit of the disk, so if you partition all-FAT32 or other FS, it can't deal with that. Perhaps if I'd been using another FS it would have thrown an error, but I was using FAT32 which may have been similar enough to seem to work but then fail due to the differences. You can most likely partition the drive as you wish while it's configured to non-DOS mode, then switch it over and install the setup partition after that - I am going to try that now and will update.

Hopefully no further issues arise, I'll update the post with anything relevant.. This doesn't solve the issue on the Presario 425, though. It has its setup built into the BIOS like in most CMOS setup situations. I'm hoping someone intimately familiar with variations of IDE and with SATA can enlighten us to perhaps something the adapters aren't doing that an older IDE variation would expect/assume?

Edit: interestingly, it seems this mode has made a new entire *disk* appear (on its own "Unknown Controller"), called "BIOS drive (81 hex) 667 MBYTES". Since it requires a HDD to store the setup and there's no other HDD installed I'm quite confused as to what that's talking about. Perhaps it's a dummy device introduced to allow it to boot without a setup partition? I'm going to not touch that, and see if I can get the setup partition on the actual drive.

Edit 2: To avoid me banging my head on the wall (or others) trying to figure this out again in the future, here's the step-by-step for my situation.
- Hook up drive, boot to Compaq Setup disk.
- Set drive to non-DOS.
- Boot to Ontrack disk(s) if applicable for disk size (or other DDO if you like, I like Ontrack with DDO version 9.88 ), and setup the disk to install the overlay.
- If you want to stick to using the boot disks to get to diagnostics or setup, you're good to go and can stop here.
- Boot through the DDO to a partitioning tool and delete all partitions (I recommend Ranish for DOS machines if you need large disk support). The diagnostics disk would tell you that you need 2MB of space free at the start of the disk, but after actually doing the diagnostics partition setup it makes a 16MB partition, so you could try setting this up at this point in advance and using "Upgrade Diagnostics Partition" later - I have not tested this yet.
- Boot to the Compaq Setup disk, and switch it back to DOS mode for the boot HDD (on boot it will throw a Disk 0 error, this is normal when the setup partition is missing).
- Boot to Compaq Diagnostics disk through the DDO and it will alert you that there's no diagnostics partition, and have you reboot (be sure to take the disk out so you can boot through the DDO to the Compaq Diagnostics disk). This is the reboot between it partitioning and then it formatting the diagnostics partition.
- It will format and set up the diagnostics partition, prompting you for the diagnostics and setup disks as it goes.
- Boot through the DDO to your partitioning tool and set up whatever partitions you want after the diagnostics partition and you're good to go for installing your OS.
 
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