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Philips p3230 hard drive replacement

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RetroSpector78

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Belgum
Hi,

I'm in the process of restoring an old Philips p3230 PC (286 machine). The original harddrive, a Seagate ST-157A no longer works unfortunately and the setup program of the PC only supports a limited number of old drives (tandon, miniscribe, rodime, connor, ....).
I don't have any of the supported drives.

Just for the heck of it I inserted a 1gb western digital IDE drive in the PC, and was able to format it (40MB) when the PC was still configured for the ST-157A.
I wasn't able to boot from the drive, but could boot from a floppy and see the drives content.

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.

I don't really care about size, and have no problem installing for example a 400MB hard drive if I can only use 40MB.

Thx.
 
If you think Western Digital drives are compatible with your machine I have some you might want to try.

They are : 120 MB, 170 MB and 250 MB.

I also have a Conner 170 MB.
 
RetroSpector78 said:
Hi,

I'm in the process of restoring an old Philips p3230 PC (286 machine). The original harddrive, a Seagate ST-157A no longer works unfortunately and the setup program of the PC only supports a limited number of old drives (tandon, miniscribe, rodime, connor, ....).
I don't have any of the supported drives.

Just for the heck of it I inserted a 1gb western digital IDE drive in the PC, and was able to format it (40MB) when the PC was still configured for the ST-157A.
I wasn't able to boot from the drive, but could boot from a floppy and see the drives content.

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.

I don't really care about size, and have no problem installing for example a 400MB hard drive if I can only use 40MB.

Thx.
Click to expand...

Try one of these?
http://www.memorydepot.com/ssd/listcat.html?catid=edc-1se40
 
In this case they don’t need to be time period correct, so I was wondering to what extend a drive with different geometries could work with the “known” drives. Or is it impossible to make it work with other drives.

I don’t mind installing a 400mb drive and only being able to format 40mb of it.

I was surprised to see the cmos not complaining about the 1gb drive and that I was able to format it.
 
T-R-A said:
You may also want to look here:

https://forum.system-cfg.com/viewtopic.php?t=3096

which appears to have a link (at the bottom of the page) to the setup utility on floppy disk. Probably handy if you want to explore other drive capacities.
Click to expand...

That’s the setup utility I’m using, and contains over a dozen different drives, but no user type where you can specify a custom geometry
 
Old machines (8088/86 and 80286) generally didn't do custom drive geometry. Being released around the DOS 1.x to 3.x era, there was seldom a reason for the BIOS to support drives more than 100MB or so.
 
T-R-A said:
Old machines (8088/86 and 80286) generally didn't do custom drive geometry. Being released around the DOS 1.x to 3.x era, there was seldom a reason for the BIOS to support drives more than 100MB or so.
Click to expand...

That brings me to my original question. What happens when the cmos is configured for a certain cylinder/heads/sector combo and you insert another one ? In this case the pc boots fine and says hard drive ready. I could format the drive and put stuff on it, but was not able to boot from it. What is the technical reason behind that ? And can you make other drives work if you for example make sure they have the same number of heads, but less / equal / more cylinders....
 
RetroSpector78 said:
And can you make other drives work if you for example make sure they have the same number of heads, but less / equal / more cylinders....
Click to expand...
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.
 
RetroSpector78 said:
That brings me to my original question. What happens when the cmos is configured for a certain cylinder/heads/sector combo and you insert another one ? In this case the pc boots fine and says hard drive ready. I could format the drive and put stuff on it, but was not able to boot from it. What is the technical reason behind that ? And can you make other drives work if you for example make sure they have the same number of heads, but less / equal / more cylinders....
Click to expand...

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.
 
RetroSpector78 said:
...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..
Click to expand...

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.
 
3pcedev said:
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.
Click to expand...
This is exactly what I would do if I were the OP.
 
Stone said:
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.
Click to expand...

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 ?
 
Malc said:
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.
Click to expand...

No I had not, but indeed definitely an option. Thx for the pointer.
 
RetroSpector78 said:
Thx for the tip on the comspec ... did not know about that one ...
Click to expand...
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.
 
3pcedev said:
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.
Click to expand...

Will give it a try. I have the same concern. Thanks!
 
neosunrise said:
This is exactly what I would do if I were the OP.
Click to expand...

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 ?
 
RetroSpector78 said:
That's what I did , but it still didn't cause it to boot.
Click to expand...
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.
 
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