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old ISA IO card + 428mb HDD = problem

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First post, by retro games 100

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Is this ISA-based multi IO controller card too old to cope with an old 428 mb ("large") Seagate HDD? The HDD has got 899 cylinders. It rarely gets auto detected inside the mobo's BIOS, and when it does, the mobo won't boot from it.

I've tried this 428mb HDD on another ISA-based multi IO controller card, a bigger better looking Goldstar card, and it worked OK. I guess this Goldstar controller card is "super" or "enhanced", whereas the one in the photo may be for older computers like 386s?

I wonder if I could limit the size of the Seagate 428mb HDD, in order to "trick" this old IO card in to thinking it's a smaller HDD? I have got a copy of Seagate's SeaTools for DOS - on a bootable CD. I might try booting from this CD (using a more modern mobo), and then see if it can reduce the size of this old HDD.

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Reply 2 of 3, by retro games 100

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h-a-l-9000 wrote:

It could just be broken. These old ISA cards are nothing more than address decoders and I/O buffers.

I wonder...could there be something wrong with the HDD perhaps? The reason I ask is because this 428.1mb (sticker on HDD says so) is regularly identified by various IO controller cards and also ancient mobos as only being 408mb.

Reply 3 of 3, by retro games 100

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Update: I have just tested this ISA-based IO controller in a socket 7 board, and it works fine. The HDD (as mentioned in my O.P.) was correctly detected (using the mobo's BIOS auto detect HDD feature), and the capacity was also correctly identified too at 428mb. The mobo then went on to correctly boot up from this HDD.

Now I will test out those 2 ancient PCI-based IDE cards........

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