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Tandy 1000RL hard disk trouble

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commodorejohn

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I recently acquired a Seagate ST351 IDE/XT hard drive for my 1000RL. It arrived this past weekend in seemingly good condition - it spins up and rattles the head around like any other drive, no squealing or anything. However, when I plugged it into the RL, the computer got past its memory test and came up with "Disk Boot Error;" this seems to be some sort of trouble with the floppy drive, since it repeats the message when I remove and reinsert a floppy disk. Doubly odd, since it's set to boot from the internal ROM anyway, not the floppy or the hard disk. When I unplug the drive, it goes back to functioning as normal, but as soon as I plug it back in, no boot. I looked in the user manual, but I can't find any mention of any settings that need to be changed for hard-drive installation. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?
 
If this is the same 351A/X drive that was also used in the RLX, I think there is a jumper that has to be set for either 8 bit XTIDE (for the Tandy) or 16 bit regular IDE. It it had previously been used on a non Tandy, it is probably still jumpered for 16 bit.
 
Okay, that was the problem! It boots now and recognizes that the hard disk is installed, but the only partition on the drive is a "non-DOS partition" according to FDISK, which isn't allowing me to delete it. How do I go about partitioning this baby for DOS 3.2 use?
 
To save time I would slap that drive in a (modern) pc and run WIndows Disk Manager to get rid of the unwanted partition. With DOS 3.2 FDISK, I assume assume you tried option '5' - Remove Non-DOS Partition?
 
for the record, you can also do this little program in DOS's debug.

a:>debug

-a
mov ax, 0301
mov cx, 1
mov dx, 80
int 13
int 3
<enter>
g
q

that will nuke 1 sector on the first installed hard drive.
use with caution!

This is the same thing as what kb2syd is linking to, but man, MS sure makes it difficult to understand what they are doing there.
 
Well, the DEBUG trick worked beautifully, and it's all partitioned. Only one problem remains: DOS doesn't seem to map a drive letter to the extended partition that takes up the remaining ~8MB of space on the drive. Any way to address this without moving to a later version of DOS than is present in the ROM, or do I just write off that partition and reserve it for experimenting with, say, CP/M-86 or something?

Update: scratch that, I deleted and re-created the extended partition and this time it asked to assign a logical drive to it. Don't know why it didn't before.
 
Last edited:
hargle said:
This is the same thing as what kb2syd is linking to, but man, MS sure makes it difficult to understand what they are doing there.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I didn't have my parsed down notes here at work, but remembered the kb article. I have it printed out in my frequently references area at home. Thanks hargle.
 
Coming back to this thread, I'm still trying to figure out the partition thing. The leftover-space partition exists, but it doesn't get assigned a drive letter (I'm assuming this is because D is taken by the RL's ROM disk, on which DOS is stored.) There's also a phantom drive E that displays a drive size of 4KB (!) and won't actually store data but will allow file entries to be written to the directory (I'm assuming it's just writing to a RAM copy of the directory?)

What the blankety-blank is going on here? I'd like to get this working, as it's a good 8MB out of 43MB that I'd hate to see go to waste, but I have no idea what the computer thinks it's doing or how to fix it.
 
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