New Hard Drive Problems

[Kev Sharratt]

Hi

My 2nd PC is an old machine and it had a 4.3Gb hard drive which got full. I bought a 2nd hand 20Gb Hard Drive a Fujitsu MOG3204AT. My system would only detect 8.5Gb using what was printed on the label C 16383, H 16, S 63, but all the deferent drives listed had the same settings?. I then went to the fujitsu web site & looked at the manual online, it basically said that the host system could detect Heads & Sectors but you could lie about the cylinders as long as the capacity did not excede that of the drive. I then increased the cylinders until I got a capacity of 19.5Gb (near enough, the girls (my daughters) will never fill 20.5Gb anyway). I ran Fdisk partitioned the drive C: (18.5Gb) d: (1Gb Image for CD writer), formated both drives without any problems. Then I installed Win 98SE again without problems until.... it was finding & installing various cards and now it keeps freezing & the hard drive light is almost perminantly on even when I'm doing nothing and the drive is making unusual noises (nothing nasty sounding or loud but not the hard drive sounds I am used to)

So I thought I had better check that I was making any mistakes that may trash the drive

The Mobo is a MSI MS 5129 and I have already installed the latest bios. Processor is P233MMX with 128Mb of ram

PS One thing I forgot to mention. In the manual it mentioned another jumper setting for a master drive (2 jumpers intead of the 1 I am using) but this was only to be used if the Mobo didn't see more than 2.1Gb so I did not use this

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Kev

:confused:

[rangeral]

If its a used drive then maybe you should have deleted the partition if you just formated the existing partition or start over fresh and write zeros to the drive, see if the fuji utility can do this for now.

[Kev Sharratt]

Hi

Sorry I should have mentioned that I deleted the existing partitions and then created my own before I formatted

thanks again

Kev

[rangeral]

Okay then if your still having problems then write zeros to the drive or lowlevelformat (llf) the drive to bring it back to a factory state, you can find the erase utility here

http://www.fujitsu.ca/download/hard_drive.html

[AllGamer]

If that still fails, it's time to return it and get another drive :t

[Kev Sharratt]

Hi

Thanks for the advice, managed to get it sorted. As advised I used the fujitsu clean program to wipe the disk (it took ages) and I noticed on the same page a program call disk go! a utility for systems whose bios's don't recognise the full drive capacity. You use this & not fdisk. Strange thing was it got 1Gb less capacity than I did when I fixed the cylinders number in the BIOS. I wonder if I got confused between 1000 & 1024 Mb = 1 Gb and tried to setup the drive to use more capacity than it phsically had

thanks again for your help


Kev:D

PS: The fusitsu site re-directed me to another company who wanted to charge me $14.50 for the disk go! utility, so I looked on driversguide and found it there for free.

[Eric Legge]

If you enabled large disk support, and you have the latest BIOS for the board installed, and the BIOS options for the hard drives are set to Auto under the Type and Mode columns of the Standard CMOS Setup page, you shouldn't have needed to set the heads, etc.

If you did set the drive incorrectly then that was probably the cause of the problem.

BTW, did you download and install the latest updates for the motherboard - busmaster drivers, AGP drivers, USB Controller, patches, etc?

Eric,

http://www.legge40.freeserve.co.uk/BuyerBeware.htm

[Kev Sharratt]

Hi

Yes I had all the latest updates I could get, BIOS etc, the trouble was it is a very old Mobo when I bought it it was running a P133.I had to flash with the latest BIOS in order to run a P233MMX. I don't think MSI will be doing any further updates for the Mobo, when I asked for the USB pinout seqence from their help email address, I get a reply to say they had received my question and then nothing and that was 6 months ago, so I bought a PCI USB card instead. THe machine is old but it will do for my daughters for a while.

thanks for your help

Kev

[Asonic]

Originally posted by AllGamer
If that still fails, it's time to return it and get another drive :t

The Law in this country is not quite as simple as that when dealing with 2nd hand goods.