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HDD VIRTUAL FAILURE

Trish's Escape from Hardware Hell Help Board » Hardware » Hard Drive and Storage Related » HDD VIRTUAL FAILURE « Previous Next »

Author Message
rob walker
Posted on Sunday, March 18, 2001 - 2:22 pm:   

I bought an old 586 the other day as a second unit . It had 2X125meg HDD's and 1X250meg drive. These worked fine but are too small so I bought a second hand 1.7gig HDD. When I booted it with a floppy the bios "found" it OK as the primary master but then I got a message "disk I/O error replace disk then press any key". I tried the HDD in my other computer and no problems as all. So I replaced the three small drives to see if these still worked as I may have broken something when installing the 1.7 drive. But they all work fine.
Since then I have tinkered with the bios settings including resetting it back to standard setup in case the previous owner had done something to accommodate the 3 drives but nothing has worked. I am at my wits end !!
The MB is 8433uud-a Biostar I think and bios is award modular V4.5 pg.
Any ideas and I will be soooo grateful
Thanks,
Rob Walker
I
Trish
Posted on Sunday, March 18, 2001 - 11:40 pm:   

A few thoughts...

Will the BIOS auto detect the new drive?

Are you sure the jumper settings are correct on it? (set to master)

When you boot to the floppy, type sys C: to make it bootable in case it isn't.

Have you tried hooking it up as a slave drive to one of the ones that does boot? It should work then and you can see if it has system files on it.
Rob walker
Posted on Monday, March 19, 2001 - 2:36 pm:   

Dear Trish,
Thanks for your reply. To answer your questions:
Yes the bios does detect it.
Jumpers are definately set right. I tried it on my new pentium and the drive works fine as the master or slave with appropriate jump setings. I installed windows 98 and ran Norton disk doctor and TuffTest from windows but they both reported no problems with the drive. But when I put it back in the 586 computer I got the same old message.....I/O error.....eerie eh !!.
Since posting my message I have even updated the bios but no success.
regards
Rob
Katy R (Catsidea)
Posted on Monday, March 19, 2001 - 3:05 pm:   

Rob, are you using the same ribbon in both machines? I was getting the same error on my "current project" on my desk, and replaced the ribbon to the mobo with a new one, and the problem went away. Just a thought.
rob walker
Posted on Tuesday, March 20, 2001 - 1:31 am:   

Thanks for the thought Katy. Yes I have tried different ribbons but no success.
I have however got some more info that may help in my problem diagnosis.
Firstly, I have run my 6.5gig drive from my new computer on the 586 and it works fine with no bios changes required so the MB on the 586 is OK. But I have also noted that on bootup of the 586 I get the following screen: "Award modular Bios 4.50 pg 486PCI with IDE and I/O - 960410S". This may be significant as the error message refers to "disk I/O error" so pewrhaps I have a BIOS with an unwanted I/O perameter.
Hope this is of some help and thanks again to you for assistance.
Rob
Australia.
rob walker
Posted on Tuesday, March 20, 2001 - 11:13 am:   

My I/O error problem solved. I got an email from a John Matthews and I will post his message here for any other poor soul who comes up against this problem in the future.
Johns message follows:
"Rob have a look at this site , I did'nt have time to post or look up this site , but from
memory it refers to a overlay program needed to run a HD over 500 something mb on 486/586 .
If it dos'nt , these are the sites to get that program .
John".

Maxtor's is called MaxBlast ,
http://www.maxtor.com/products/DiamondMax/software/maxblast/index.html

Seagate's is DiscWizard ,
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz_utilities.html

Quantum's is DiskManager ,
http://service.quantum.com/softsource/disk_docs/dm2000.htm

IBM have a selection ,
http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm

Fujitsu's is OnTrack DiskGo ,
http://www.fcpa.com/cgi-bin/goFrames.cgi/support/su_drivers.html

Western Digital's is Data Lifeguard Tools ,
http://www.wdc.com/service/ftp/drives.html#dlgtools

Samsung's is ClearHDD Program ,
http://www.samsungelectronics.com/support/hdd/utilities/utilities_03.html"

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