PhilipA
Experienced Member
Howdy
Figure this is a better place to put this thread, rather than in the 3/486 area.
Seeing as I have my Compaq Portable 386 in pieces on the living room floor:
20130804_230835 by renault9gta, on Flickr
(Sorry for the shockingly bad picture)
I had been reading up a few other threads on the Portable III and 386, and had seen that a few people had tried to add large volume (>528Mb) drives to the machines, but none of the threads seemed to have much of a conclusion.
Decided to give it a try myself. Found an IDE drive (Hitachi DeskStar 30Gb) which worked nicely in my old P75 before it went pop. 7200 RPM drive, with a blazing 53Mb/sec transfer speed, low seek time... sounded like a nice recipe. The P75 used to boot into W3.11 in 14 seconds flat from being switched off. Figured I didn't mind losing 29.5Gb of space, the drive used to come back as 7.8Gb under W95, so no real point to begin with trying a dynamic overlay.
Took a look on the Compaq settings utility diskette for options. Found that the bios supports "Type 42" drives, which is 1024/16/63 in C/H/S, resulting in the theoretical largest BIOS-supported drive (though it did say there was a ~630Mb option, it doesn't provide C/H/S values). Set the BIOS to Type 42 and booted up a floppy with SpeedStor on.
SpeedStor found the drive, initialized and scanned it thoroughly, finding no issues. It even marked it as formatted for DOS.
Rebooted the computer, feeling jubilant.
A:\> c:
Invalid Drive Specification
A:\> _
Aw, poop. Okay, all isn't lost. Let's reconnect the old hard drive, grab FDISK and FORMAT off of it and give that a try. Cue five minutes for the config utility to boot off floppy, find the old hard drive, set it as TYPE 17 (42Mb), save the files to floppy, power down, reconnect the new drive, boot the utility again, set to TYPE 42 (528Mb), then save, swap floppies and boot DOS.
Run FDISK. It finds the drive, asks me if I'd like to make all the space available on the disk. I select Y, and the computer reboots.
Try again, selecting N this time. "MAX SIZE 503Mb". Sure, what the heck. Partition written and activated. Hit Esc. Reboot to floppy.
A:\> c:
Invalid Drive Specification
A:\> _
.....really? Start up FDISK again. No partitions defined. Odd. Re-run SpeedStor. Reformat, reboot, re-run... there's nothing on the disk, despite it reporting back 100% good.
Have I hit a BIOS snag, you think? Or maybe the hard disk reallllllly doesn't like having 1023 cylinders instead of the 16383 it actually has available? Or an incompatibility between the drive reporting 16,000 sectors from firmware and logically only having 1023? The drive has 16383/16/63 C/H/S so I figured with that it should just get to 1023 and stop, with the H/S being what the BIOS is expecting.
I'm a bit stuck. I think I might have another hard drive here that I can try it out on. Anyone had any luck with this machine and a particular type/brand of drive?
Thanks
--Phil
Figure this is a better place to put this thread, rather than in the 3/486 area.
Seeing as I have my Compaq Portable 386 in pieces on the living room floor:
20130804_230835 by renault9gta, on Flickr
(Sorry for the shockingly bad picture)
I had been reading up a few other threads on the Portable III and 386, and had seen that a few people had tried to add large volume (>528Mb) drives to the machines, but none of the threads seemed to have much of a conclusion.
Decided to give it a try myself. Found an IDE drive (Hitachi DeskStar 30Gb) which worked nicely in my old P75 before it went pop. 7200 RPM drive, with a blazing 53Mb/sec transfer speed, low seek time... sounded like a nice recipe. The P75 used to boot into W3.11 in 14 seconds flat from being switched off. Figured I didn't mind losing 29.5Gb of space, the drive used to come back as 7.8Gb under W95, so no real point to begin with trying a dynamic overlay.
Took a look on the Compaq settings utility diskette for options. Found that the bios supports "Type 42" drives, which is 1024/16/63 in C/H/S, resulting in the theoretical largest BIOS-supported drive (though it did say there was a ~630Mb option, it doesn't provide C/H/S values). Set the BIOS to Type 42 and booted up a floppy with SpeedStor on.
SpeedStor found the drive, initialized and scanned it thoroughly, finding no issues. It even marked it as formatted for DOS.
Rebooted the computer, feeling jubilant.
A:\> c:
Invalid Drive Specification
A:\> _
Aw, poop. Okay, all isn't lost. Let's reconnect the old hard drive, grab FDISK and FORMAT off of it and give that a try. Cue five minutes for the config utility to boot off floppy, find the old hard drive, set it as TYPE 17 (42Mb), save the files to floppy, power down, reconnect the new drive, boot the utility again, set to TYPE 42 (528Mb), then save, swap floppies and boot DOS.
Run FDISK. It finds the drive, asks me if I'd like to make all the space available on the disk. I select Y, and the computer reboots.
Try again, selecting N this time. "MAX SIZE 503Mb". Sure, what the heck. Partition written and activated. Hit Esc. Reboot to floppy.
A:\> c:
Invalid Drive Specification
A:\> _
.....really? Start up FDISK again. No partitions defined. Odd. Re-run SpeedStor. Reformat, reboot, re-run... there's nothing on the disk, despite it reporting back 100% good.
Have I hit a BIOS snag, you think? Or maybe the hard disk reallllllly doesn't like having 1023 cylinders instead of the 16383 it actually has available? Or an incompatibility between the drive reporting 16,000 sectors from firmware and logically only having 1023? The drive has 16383/16/63 C/H/S so I figured with that it should just get to 1023 and stop, with the H/S being what the BIOS is expecting.
I'm a bit stuck. I think I might have another hard drive here that I can try it out on. Anyone had any luck with this machine and a particular type/brand of drive?
Thanks
--Phil
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