Questions tagged [hard-disk]
Hard disk drives: hardware, connection, low-level format and drivers.
102 questions
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What form factor did the first-gen "compact Mac" HDDs use?
When I was growing up I had access to a Mac Classic fully kitted out with a full 4MB of RAM and an internal SCSI 40MB hard drive. I never got to open the thing up (and wouldn't have known how to do so ...
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What's the maximum amount of sectors an LBA ROM-BIOS sector read call can access?
I recently added support for multi-sector CHS reads to an experimental fork of my kernel's initial loader, described in https://github.com/SvarDOS/bugz/issues/174
I have some space left before the ...
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Seagate ST9051A data recovery, PCB fault, drive data corrupted
I have a Seagate ST9051A 2.5" IDE hard disk drive from 1992, which shipped with an Amiga 1200. Some years ago the drive stopped working and was decommissioned.
I recently tried using the drive ...
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Do today's SSD's have IDE compatibility issues that they didn't have a few years ago?
I work with a bunch of Win-98, NT4 and 2K systems that run on older hardware and over the years I've migrated (cloned) hard drives from these systems as a way to keep them going. Cloned them to ...
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How does Windows 98 decide about CHS or LBA access?
How exactly does Windows 98 decide about CHS or LBA access of a specific HDD device or a partition within it? Let's suppose that the BIOS has reported that it supports LBA access for the HDD device.
I ...
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When pushing interleave too far, why do bad sectors occur mainly at the low addresses?
This lady low-leveled a 20M MFM drive and turned it into a 32M RLL drive by switching the controller.
First of all, this is amazing stage magic. If I had known about this, I would have sold RLL ...
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Does DOS require partitions to be aligned at a cylinder boundary?
Large Disk HOWTO §6.2 claims that MS-DOS 6.22 requires extended partitions to be aligned to a cylinder boundary.
On the other hand, another article I found claims that any alignment requirement is a ...
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Did any PC disk defragmentor optimize cylinder position?
Defragmentation was used to minimize harddisk waiting times as the read head - which took milliseconds to move - was close to the next file to read when done with this one.
In hard drives with ...
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Troubleshooting ST-238R and WD1002A controller card
Having a cryptic issue with this pair of hardware. Scenario:
Amstrad PC1640DD (manual here) with one floppy long since swapped out for an HDD. Exact controller card is WD1002A-27X (board photos ...
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When did PC hard drives no longer require you to park the heads?
It wasn't MFM or RLL. IDE? SATA?
Yes, I know these are encoding methods. But their introduction corresponds to times, and it's those times and those drives that I remember fondly, When life was ...
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Origin of CHS geometry limits in BIOS calls
A small preface: the XT wire HDD interface had limits of 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors. But the BIOS calls (int 13h with AH = 02, 03, 08) provided different limits: 1024 cylinders (CL[7:6]&...
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Did Steve Gibson's Spinrite actually do anything useful by "refreshing" the disc's magnetic domains?
Spinrite saved my ass many times. It refreshed the low level disk format (sector definitions), something that DOS couldn't do.
But on 80s TV shows, Steve said that it was necessary to rewrite the ...
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Cloning old Quantum drive using 68 pin to 50 pin adapter
I’m now trying to clone a 50 pin SCSI drive on XW8000 machine. The cable is 68 pin SCSI and has a terminator at the end, my dd command is able to copy the drive to USB, but whenever I try to restore ...
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When was the end of the floppy-only IBM PC clone?
Can we pinpoint in what year the number of IBM-compatible PCs (whether original IBM machines or clones) sold without a hard disk drive became so negligible that almost all new commercial software, ...
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What was the hardware-level data format on IBM 1316 or 2316 disk packs?
A description of the hardware-level track format of the IBM media used on the BESM-6 I've found is as follows (translated by Google with minimal corrections):
Track header structure:
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