Seagate ST-277n. Low level format?

[ST251]

It comes on for a bit and thats it.

okay, at least that means the drive itself is functioning. my next step would have been to try to run a program that can do a low level surface scan of the drive (for example MHDD) and see what that reports. it's in my opinion a good way to see if a drive has weak heads

 

[fjk61011]

A there's the problem. With the adapter in the XT the FDD doesn't work.

 

[fjk61011]

I seem to have gotten further along the road of happy destiny. The Scsi splash screen shows one drive. After a bit a message comes up 0 14xxx (cylinders?). With an XT-IDE in the system I was able to format what I think is the scsi drive. However I cant boot from it. and Fdisk doesn't recognise it.

 

[fjk61011]

Just remembered that I have dos 3,30 on the XT-ide CF card.

That is the IBM 5.25" Diskette Drive Adapter, the floppy controller that IBM supplied in the PC and XT.
See [here].




The 'floppy controller' functionality within the ST02 (photo at [here]) will conflict with the IBM 5.25" Diskette Drive Adapter.

Looking at the installation guide for the ST02, available at [here], there is no jumper to disable the ST02's floppy controller functionality.
Try removing the IBM 5.25" Diskette Drive Adapter, and connecting the floppy cable to the ST02 instead.

Using floppy connector on the Scsi card

 

[fjk61011]

The drive I actually formatted was the D : drive on the xtide drive.

I've managed to llf the st-255n with an interleave of 10.i don't know if that matters. Fdisked and formatting now. 60.7 M

 

[fjk61011]

Should be 277n. Statson size is same as mine. Drive boots to dos

 

[fjk61011]

https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-d...LOGY-INC-Up-to-seven-SCSI-devices-ST-214.html

I'm not sure of pin 1 of jp6

Also there is a pin missing from the fdd header and i don't have a fdd cable with a slot for the card

Fdd could be dead.

 

[fjk61011]

I spent the afternoon LLF, FDISK and FORMAT. I then installed MS-DOS 6.22. After all that I get "SCSI controller Failure".

 

[fjk61011]

Working again.

 

[btb]

Along these lines - I have a head-crashed ST-225N - If I swap the electronics over to a more readily-available ST-225 (MFM version) I could theoretically LL format it and it'd work?

 

[jafir]

Along these lines - I have a head-crashed ST-225N - If I swap the electronics over to a more readily-available ST-225 (MFM version) I could theoretically LL format it and it'd work?

Probably, see the video linked in the following thread: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/seagate-5-25-st-277r-frankendrive.80181/
He did something similar with a 277R and 277N which share the same C/H/S

It looks like the C/H/S for a 225 and 225N are the same so I’d say give it a try.