Philips p3230 hard drive replacement

[Malc]

...What kind of options do I have to replace the hard drive so that I am able to use it properly and boot from it..

Have you thought about the XTIDE Universal Bios, As long as you have somewhere to home the bios for example a boot rom socket on a NIC card and set hard drives to none in the system setup so that the XUB can take control of the hard drive.

[neosunrise]

Before you give up on the 1GB drive try the following:

- Boot from floppy with FDISK/FORMAT on it.
- Run FDISK and delete all the partitions present on the drive.
- Set up a 40MB partition and make sure it is set as 'active'.
- Reboot the PC and boot from floppy again
- Run 'FORMAT C: /s'
- Reboot; see if it boots up from the HDD. If it does not then boot from floppy again and....
- Run 'FDISK /MBR'
- Reboot and see if it boots from the HDD.

This is exactly what I would do if I were the OP.

[RetroSpector78]

Other drives may work (as you have already discovered). You may not be able to boot from them due to the geometry mismatch but if you're willing to boot from the floppy the hard drive is useable.

Once the machine is booted you can then remove the floppy disk. In order to prevent the machine from occasionally asking to insert the floppy you can put a copy of command.com on the hard disk and a line in your autoexec.bat... set comspec = C:\command.com and you won't be asked for the floppy again when the transient portion of command.com is needed.

Thx for the tip on the comspec ... did not know about that one ... What is the technical reason that one can format and possibly use the "wrong" hard drive but not boot from it ? Is it because it is having trouble locating or interpreting the MBR due to the mismatch in geometry ?

[RetroSpector78]

Have you thought about the XTIDE Universal Bios, As long as you have somewhere to home the bios for example a boot rom socket on a NIC card and set hard drives to none in the system setup so that the XUB can take control of the hard drive.

No I had not, but indeed definitely an option. Thx for the pointer.

[Stone]

Thx for the tip on the comspec ... did not know about that one ...

One of the greatest DOS tutorials I have ever used is The Best of DOS Help From PC Computing Magazine and Flambeaux Software. It's a hypertext reference of all things DOS. It's simple to use and quite complete. I've had it since it came out ~ 30 years ago and I still refer to it.

Go here:

http://cd.textfiles.com/pcmedic9310/UTILS/DOS_HELP/

It's BESTODOS.ZIP.

[PopularGriffon]

Before you give up on the 1GB drive try the following:

- Boot from floppy with FDISK/FORMAT on it.
- Run FDISK and delete all the partitions present on the drive.
- Set up a 40MB partition and make sure it is set as 'active'.
- Reboot the PC and boot from floppy again
- Run 'FORMAT C: /s'
- Reboot; see if it boots up from the HDD. If it does not then boot from floppy again and....
- Run 'FDISK /MBR'
- Reboot and see if it boots from the HDD.

Will give it a try. I have the same concern. Thanks!

[RetroSpector78]

This is exactly what I would do if I were the OP.

That's what I did , but it still didn't cause it to boot.

However, it seems mismatch in geometry was causing other issues as well. (error reading / writing to the disk) and not just booting so I gave up on it.

I still had an old Connor CP30254 250MB hard drive that I then tried.
Although not supported by the CMOS setup, the closest match I found in the CMOS was a Connor CP3104 so I configured the CMOS to use that.
I was able to format the drive (albeit only 100MB) and install MS-DOS 5.0 on it without issues. I could now also boot from the drive.

Not sure if this is going to continue running stable. Any tips on a good piece of software that has a set of tests that will check all aspects of the drive giving me some confidence that this might work on a longer term ?

[Stone]

That's what I did , but it still didn't cause it to boot.

That's because the BIOS choked on the geometry. One way to get around that is to use a DDO. That will successfully get the BIOS to be able to recognize the entire drive as well as boot. DDOs have their own issues but not likely anything to cause you to not want to use one. It can't hurt to give it a try.