A 4.3gb drive on an old 486 was probably running with a boot mgr.  If this
is the case, go to Western Digital's web site and download the software or
reload it if you have it and diagnose from there.

If you were not using boot mgr. software, then you are likely not getting
the original BIOS readings for your IDE drive that you originally used when
you installed the OS ie: LBA, Normal, Auto.

When you run FDisk from a boot floppy, are you able to "see" the drive? If
not, then you need to try different BIOS settings for the drive on the
motherboard/controller or assume the drive is dead (highly unlikely since
you would've noticed that it now makes no noise if it were dead).

just a few ideas.
gary r. tennesen
[log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----
From: PCBUILD - Personal Computer Hardware discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Gary Cassidy
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 7:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [PCBUILD] Hard Drive Failure


I recently brought an old 486 in to get a new CMOS battery.  Since I
brought it home, I have been unable to get it to work.  I hope some folks
here can suggest steps I can take to remedy this problem.

The problem is with the hard drive (Western Digital Caviar 34300, 4.3
Gb).  The first time I tried to boot it up when I brought it home, I got a
message stating there was no operating system.  I thought perhaps the hard
drive settings had been lost with the new battery installation so entered
the Setup program and used the autodetect utility to set the drive
information.

The next boot up attempt resulted in a message that there was an invalid
media type.  Now i began to worry....

Worried about losing a small amount of data (not a major crisis, it's a
machine used mostly by my 11 year old son but has a few programming source
code files I'd like to keep), I thought I would just throw it into the new
computer and save the data to that drive before formatting and starting
anew.

I installed the drive, taking care to match the ribbon cables etc, as a
secondary master on the second IDE slot of my mobo, set the proper jumpers
on the HD and entered the setup util of the new computer.  All went well
except that I now get the following message when trying to access the drive
in Win Explorer

        D:\ Is Not Accessible

        A Device Attached to the system is not functioning.

Attempting to access the drive from a DOS box results in

        General failure reading drive D
        Abort Retry Fail

YIKES!  Looks like a problem has happened.....

Any suggestions as to what steps I can take now to try and get this thing
working again?  YES!  I will be letting the shop know of the error but want
to give it a shot this weekend.

Thanks

Gary

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