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Commodore PC 30 III Hard disk settings ?

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zippysticks

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Folks,

have acquired a Commodore PC30 II (Actually contains a Commodore PC40 III mainboard) and removed the slightly leaking CMOS backup batteries before powering up. Of course now they are removed (replacements on the way) I have lost all the settings including the hard drive config. I appear to have Commodore BIOS version 2.0 on this Machine.

Anyone know what the settings should be for a WD 93028 A (20 MB) drive please ?
Of course I have found CHS settings online (782/2/27) but none of these are configurable with this machine - it would appear to only support one of 46 predefined types with seemingly no way to manually enter these settings.

Note that the hard drive was not spinning up on first try and so I had to rotate the spindle by hand to free it up.
It now spins up and I can see the head stepper moving during self test and attempts to read from the drive - its quite possible the drive is dead in some other way but I'd like to try and find appropriate settings in order to test. I don't currently have another working machine to try the drive in.

Thanks
 
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Try (782/2/27)

Edit: Nevermind, you said you can't edit the settings, but those are the proper numbers.

Second edit: I see you edited the 1s out. Ok.

It's a long shot, but you could compare notes regardless. This guy over at Vogons.org recently acquired a PC30-III and might be able to help if you PM him. Just a thought.

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=17341&start=23520#p673138
 
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Thanks - I did actually find it in the BIOS table as type 31 - noticed I had to use pgup/pgdwn to scroll through the table - doh !
Either way, although the drive now spins up and the machine attempts to move the heads during detection it is still failing. Not sure what else I can do with this drive. Looks like I'll need another old drive drive or modern ISA flash alternative.
 
zippysticks said:
Looks like I'll need another old drive drive or modern ISA flash alternative.
Click to expand...
May I suggest to have a look at this page of mine: http://baltissen.org/newhtm/pc286upg.htm? It enables you to use almost any modern big IDE drive. One catch: what ever big HDD you use, the Universal BIOS will limit it to 8 GB. But compared to the 512 MB you have now that shouldn't be a problem, I think :)
FYI: I use a Seagate 20 GB.
 
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That is really useful - thanks. I'll take a look at my board this weekend and see if this can be applied.

Ruud said:
May I suggest to have a look at this page of mine: http://baltissen.org/newhtm/pc286upg.htm? It enables you to use almost any modern big IDE drive. One catch: what ever big HDD you use, the Universal BIOS will limit it to 8 GB. But compared to the 512 MB you have now that shouldn't be a problem, I think :)
FYI: I use a Seagate 20 GB.
Click to expand...
 
Ruud said:
One catch: what ever big HDD you use, the Universal BIOS will limit it to 8 GB.
Click to expand...

Actually, that's a limitation of DOS, not the XTIDE Universal BIOS. XUB supports LBA48 which means it can handle drives with 2^48 sectors, or 144 115 188 075 855 872 bytes or 131 072 terabytes. Obviously this is not tested since no existing drive is anywhere near this limit.
 
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