On USB adapter ? ~120MB Conner or MiniScribe HDD, if memory serves.
Some other drives of similar capacity had to be hooked to the on-board IDE to get them working.

Afaik, USB to IDE adapters only work with hard disks that support LBA. This rules out every HDD with less than 528 MB.

Thanks, i'll check again. 😀

Okay.. Seems things aren't as simple as expected. There's more.

Just did a little experiment with another old IDE drive,
since the original test with a Conner/MiniScribe had happened in the 2000s
and I nolonger have that drive.. :

Apparently, my Conner CP3000 (42MB) has a native mode that neither conforms to CHS, E-CHS or LBA.

In native mode, drive geometry is 1045 cylinders, 2 heads and 40 sectors.
Only the official, "translated" geometry mentioned in the datasheet is conform (980cyl, 5hds, 17sec).

Unfortunately, not even my Pentium 133 is able to auto-detect that geometry.
So I'd say it's no wonder that my USB-IDE adapter got confused. It had no chance.

Even if it did understand CHS correctly, it would have gotten the wrong geometry.
Makes me wonder, if there were more of those weirdos out there, not only from Conner..

(Btw, the Conner CP3000 did work fine in DOS after I
used that "official" translated geometry.)

Hard Drive: CONNER: CP-3000 42MB 3.5"/SL IDE / AT (Stason)
http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/c … -SL-IDE-AT.html

redhill.net - hard drive history: Conner CP3000
http://redhill.net.au/d/140.php

Edit: Typos fixed.

Uhoh, I threw away a bunch of these drives thinking they were faulty.

My guess is:

As the adapter doesn't allow configuring the hdd, so you have to guess the exact configuration the adapter uses.
I guess you would have to create partition on hdd with adapter and pray it work with old computer in that configuration too.

robertmo wrote:

As the adapter doesn't allow configuring the hdd, so you have to guess the exact configuration the adapter uses.

No, you don't. That's the reason why those adapters do LBA only and the HDD must be capable of LBA, too.

"The Alps drives were some of the first ones to use sector translation to get more than 1024 tracks on a disc.
This used to cause troubles with the IDE 'identify' command, which was employed by auto-detect BIOS or drive
utility programs to ask the drive what its correct parameters were (heads, cylinders and sectors per track).
The Alps 40 returned its actual parameters, where more recent drives returned their logical parameters.
So, if you auto-detected an Alps 40 using a standard pre-LBA BIOS, you had to halve the cylinder count and
double either the heads or the sectors per track. (Or, for that matter, use any other three CHS figures
that added up to the correct size and didn't violate the CHS maxima: 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 SPT.)
It's been some years since we've seen one of these."
Source: http://redhill.net.au/d/17.php

"The solution was sector translation: the drive "lies" to the controller,
acting as if it has, say, 10 heads and 1024 cylinders when it actually has 5 heads and 2048 cylinders.
As long as the total space is correct, the BIOS can't tell the difference and there is no need for driver software.
A more advanced form of sector translation allows drive manufacturers to put extra sectors on the outer tracks
(which have more room) but still juggles the extra space back into simple terms that the BIOS can understand.

Nearly all drives over about 60Mb use sector translation."
Source: http://redhill.net.au/o/glos2.html#sectrans

I think this really is interesting. It hints to the circumstance,
that not only there was an IDE "indentify" command pre-dating the times of LBA,
but also that first-gen IDE drives indeed reported physical geometry that did "violate the CHS maxima".
Makes me wonder as to why they did keeping to report their real geometry at all. Other computer platforms, maybe ?

So, then, the best way to xfer data off one of these (200mb) drives is to use a motherboard that understands or works with chs and be creative with connecting another more contemporary device which can also connect to modern rigs?

I'm open to suggestions!