Hard disk problem

[Dan Murphy]

At 10:38 AM 11/30/95 -0500, Hsin-Yu Sidney Li wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am helping a colleague of mine install Linux on his PC.  The PC in
>question was "inherited" from our boss (who has decided to switch to a
>Macintosh), and is a pentium machine from a no-name company.
>
>The problem we are having is that the hard disk (Western Digital model
>AC2700, 700 MB) has on it a "Disk Manager" from a company called
>On-track.  This is code that is on the boot sector of the hard disk,
>supposedly to get around the around the 1024 cylinder problem.  (The
>BIOS is AMIBIOS, which a AMIBIOS date of 07/25/94.)  In any case, we
>couldn't read the partition table, and after calling Western Digital
>and On-track, we ended up fdisk'ing and formatting the hard disk.
>

Oh, wait a minute. Maybe I jumped the gun. When you ran FDISK and reformatted, you probably got rid of Ontrack, didn't you???


Hmmm. Let me try to redeem myself a bit, and please forgive if I'm suggesting things you have done.


Here's what I think I did when installing an EIDE drive.

Set the BIOS to be the true characteristics of the drive. (1416,16,63)

When you boot Linux, give it a bootparm : ramdisk hda=1416,16,63

Run Linux fdisk : fdisk /dev/hda

Do a display (p) - things will look messed maybe - this is OK

Go into expert mode (x)

Set cylinders = 708

set track = 32

Return to normal mode - (r)

Do another display (p) - things should look normal

Set up your Linux partitions and write it out.



Good luck once again.


Dan Murphy                 murph at vmark.com
Vmark Software             74260.3322 at compuserve.com
Westboro, MA