>On  1 Dec 98 at 12:17, Winston Pike wrote:
>
>> I have a Zenith SuperSport 286 laptop that has a Conner model
>> CP-343 hard drive. I need the drive parameters so that I can try
>> working with it again. I know for sure that there are four heads
>> but I need to know the sectors and tracks/cylinders.
>>
>> I've already downloaded the Seagate "Deskref" help (who bought out
>> Conner but it only lists a CP344. From the labeling it should be a
>> half height drive with 44 million bytes which translate to 40Meg.
>>
>> If anyone has one of these computers with a CP343 or the 20Meg
>> (CP323) and can tell me the drive specs, I would be verry thankful.
>
>  CP343 was a special model only supplied to Zenith, apparently,
>which would be why Seagate doesn't list it:
>
>  43MB: 4 heads, 805 cyls, sectors and format unknown [could be
>proprietary?]
>
>  Available data looks exactly like a CP344, except for games that
>the Zenith controller might play.
>
>  The CP344 had 4 heads, 805 cyls, and 26 sectors/track, but could be
>mapped as 5/977/17, presumably to accomodate BIOSes that could only
>deal with 17-sector formats.  This translated geometry appears to
>have been supported on the CP343 as well, so you could try it....
>
>David G
>
I'd like to thank those that responded. The drive spins-up now but I now
get various errors such as "drive not ready" or "bad controller". With these
errors, I was unable to use IDEID.exe or for that matter boot into DOS.
The "Starting MS-DOS" message appears and then the computer hangs.
I was hoping to at least be able to FDISK/FORMAT the drive.
Oh well, nothing lost either way.

On another note, how do you translate the head/cylinder/sector from
4/805/26 to 5/907/17? Is there a formula for doing this?

Winston

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