Old Hdd, Watch Those Jumpers....!

[Jon_J]

This isn't a story about losing a hard drive, it's about the reason why partitioning it took 8 hours!
I've got an old Dell P III with 2 hard drives. Long story short, I took the 7yr old 4.3GB drive out and "Ghosted" my Windows 98se to the other drive (20GB)
The 20GB was a slave, so now I jumpered it to master. The Computer seemed to take longer to boot, but windows seemed fine.
 I proceded to partition this drive to 3 partitions. This took 8 hours. I was doing other things while this was going on, but was curious as to why this was taking so long.
I looked at the sticker on the drive, (comp box was still open). The sticker says this:
No need to move jumper from this [::;;:] postion for single drive use. (semicolon bottoms are jumper points). I just assumed that since this drive was a slave, that I would make it a master.
Master looks like this  [::|::]
I didn't want to interrupt the partitioning process, so after 8 hours, I turned the comp off and jumpered the drive to what the sticker said.
It works fine now, and is a lot faster. I previously looked in windows and DMA was enabled in both situations.
The drive that I took out is perfect to backup my C3100. It's 4.3GB but is 7 years old.
I looked at Staples & Best Buy, but I only found one EIDE drive [60GB]. Most of drives sold now days are SATA or something else and are 200 to 500 GB. I don't need one of those to backup my Z. Plus, I'm unsure if those newer drives will work with my portable USB enclosure.

Jon

[xamindar]

Interesting story.  I have had strange issues like that when my drive had been jumpered wrong.  I wonder why drives these days have so many pins when they used to only have like 6 (2 for master, 2 for slave, and 2 for cable select).  What really sucks is when the drive has no label telling you how to set the jumpers which is the case with my old 10 gig drive.

[Jon_J]

That drive is a western digital. It seems like most of the common brand drives from 5 years ago and back (seagate, maxtor, western digital) had same or similar jumper settings. Most always, "Master" is the middle column. "Slave" is usually just one column over to the right or left of the middle. These drives usually had 5 columns. the other 2 are for, "cable select" and this last one varies, could be "backward compatability mode, PIO mode, or ("self test mode" for anyalizing the electronics).
I usually try to keep the documentation, especially jumper settings somewhere in my desk, for later refrence. If there's a sticker, I'll stick it to the drive, but don't cover any holes that may be on the drive casing.

If you can find the brand name, you can usually get jumper settings on the net somewhere.

Jon

[craigtyson]

IDE drives ha. When I was a lad all we had were RLL or MFM drives. Both usualy needed BIOS upgrades before you could format them (by using debug and using code in the controler card) then you would have one or more 32MB yes MB partitions assuming that you guessed the right geometry interleve settings for the drive (which never seemed to be to hand and you had to call the manufacturer to get them to fax you with the details (no internet)).  Then if you forgot to park the heads and moved the PC you'd likley to be picking up the pieces of your data in the morning...... That was 1990.... seems like only yesterday ;-)

[xamindar]

IDE drives ha. When I was a lad all we had were RLL or MFM drives. Both usualy needed BIOS upgrades before you could format them (by using debug and using code in the controler card) then you would have one or more 32MB yes MB partitions assuming that you guessed the right geometry interleve settings for the drive (which never seemed to be to hand and you had to call the manufacturer to get them to fax you with the details (no internet)).  Then if you forgot to park the heads and moved the PC you'd likley to be picking up the pieces of your data in the morning...... That was 1990.... seems like only yesterday ;-)
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Were those the drives where you select the type from the bios.  I remimber my old 386 and 486 bios' had like 47 different types of drives you could pick.

[iamasmith]

Oh man, I even remember having to manually enter the defect log off a bit of paper listing all the offsets of the tested defects on the drive before you could reliably use it...

...and Netware 2 had this horrible thing called Compsurf where you had to analyse the drive for about 2 days whilst it determined its defects.

[xatax]

Those were the days...

[Cresho]

I cannot believe you guys came from that era!  what was it?  The jetsons?

back in 1990, i was still tinkering with atari 800xl because i refused to upgrade to one of those dinosaurs.

[craigtyson]

Oh the joys of installing OS/2 or Novell
Insert disk 1 of 20 ....

Then the exitement of half way through gettting a read error or an ABEND error in Novell so you could start from scratch (Novell used to produce a book just to work out your disk volume sizes depending on how many files you had and how big they were).

MS Office came on 15 x 720kB floppies but if you were realy posh you had just bought a 1.44MB floppy which wouldnt be usable with any of your 720kB disks. Oh and if you needed a software patch you could subscribe to a BBS or Compuserve and use your 2.4kb modem (thats right 2 point 4 kilo baud to download the file)

[xamindar]

use your 2.4kb modem (thats right 2 point 4 kilo baud to download the file)
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Oh my, I used to have a "2 point 4 kilo baud" modem which i used to dial up to my friend down the street and we would play hours and hours of Warcraft 2.  Those were the days.

[speculatrix]

the biggest nightmare I had once was when I wanted to reinstall my computer - it had a pair of 80GB drive, one newer than the other, manually mirrored.

I set the newer 80GB drive as primary, disconnected the old main system drive, installed dual-boot linux and windows on the new drive, got it all patched up.

Reconnected the old drive as slave, moving the jumpers across. The old drive was corrupted! No partitions found, And I'd just wiped the only backup! Panic!

It was late, and rather than trying to run recovery programs, I went to bed. In the morning, on a hunch, I took out the new drive, set the old one back as master, and PHEW! Everything intact.

Tho' the drives were VERY similar, the jumper positions were different and I'd accidentally set a jumper on the old drive which set it to 32GB mode for old bioses, which meant all the data appeared scrambled.

That taught me two lessons. First, never, even if it's only for a very short while,  rely on a single hard disk to store all your data (if I'd run a recovery utility, it'd have wiped EVERYTHING forever). Second,  DON'T panic and run a recovery utility, reverse everything you did and put the system back to what it was before assuming that a drive is corrupt. Third, that the data on a hard drive is worth far more than the drive itself. Fourth, that I can't count

[craigtyson]

Ok hands up who's ever messed with a hard disk before checking if the backups are valid.......

My best case of this ended up with me holding the harddisk in one hand and part of its pcb and power connector in the other, well you know you have to wiggle the plug to get the power connector out, this time the wrong bit came off.

Thats about when I found no backups had run for 2 months.

So I ended up resoldering a power jack onto the hdd pcb and crossing my fingers while the server booted up........  it worked but guess who verifies backups prior to looking at a server now.

[Jon_J]

I was swapping a hard drive from another computer. This was about 12 years ago. I didn't unplug the computer's power. This hard drive and connectors didn't have orientation like modern ones do. I must have plugged it in backwards, because it made a "snap" sound, then a puff of smoke came out of it. I knew I was in trouble then....
It wasn't backed up either, but most of the stuff on it, was also on floppys.
Jon